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F 

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Class __£il 



Book Jl 






1638-1888 

The Historic Forces which gave 
RISE TO Puritanism 

An Address by William L. Kingsley 



THE HISTORIC FORCES WHICH 
GAVE RISE TO PURITANISM. 



AN ADDRESS 



ON THE OCCASION OF THE 



2^oth A nniversary 



OF THE SETTLEMENT OF 



New Haven 



APRIL 25th, 1888 



Delivered in the Center Church, before the Coiigregational Club, Aptil 2jd. 



By WILLIAM L. KINGS LEY 



NE W HA VEN 






Note. — Some pages of this Address were omitted, in consequence 
of its length, at the time of delivery. 

P. 

5 



ADDRKSS. 



Over the principal entrance to this church an inscription 
was placed, not many years a^o, by one* who will long be 
remembered here with affection, which records the fact that 
" a company of English Christians, led by John Davenport 
and Theophilus Eaton, were the founders of New Haven," 
and that " here they built their first house of worship." 
Underneath this church, where we are now gathered, reposes 
their dust ; yet their blood is still throbbing in the veins of the 
men and women who are around us. On the two hundred and 
fiftieth anniversary of the landing of that company of English 
Christians on these shores, we cannot but direct our thoughts 
to them. The impress of what they did is upon all about us. 
Even these streets, this Green, so much more spacious and 
convenient than anything which had been planned on this 
continent before their time, bear testimony to the enlightened 
views which they had of what a city should be. Even we 
ourselves, our conceptions of life, our tastes, our very preju- 
dices, are the result, in no small degree, of ideas of right and 
of duty which led them to brave the sea and all the dangers of 
an imknown wilderness. To-day that company of EngKsh 
Christians, — the forefathers of this town, — walk these streets 
once more. There is no one so thoughtless, who has not asked 
* Rev. Leonard Bacon, D.D. 



himself what manner of men they were. There is no one so 
well acquainted with their history who will not find that a new 
consideration of what it was that they undertook to do, and of 
the results which they accomplished, will serve as an ennobling 
force to give him fresh inspiration for his own narrower round 
of duty. 

But the story of what that company of Enghsh Christians 
did has been so often told, that I shall not attempt to tell it 
over again. It has seemed to me that it might better serve 
the purpose of this hour, and enable us to get a more lifelike 
conception of the personality of the founders of our town, if I 
were to recall to your minds what were some of the historic 
forces which made them what they were. The age which 
gave them birth was not isolated from those which preceded it. 
The ages are all interlocked. That which precedes always 
prepares the way for that which succeeds. Their age was the 
legitimate outcome of the ages which had gone before, as our 
age has felt the shaping influences and is the product of the 
age in which they lived. They were as truly the children of 
then- past as we are of our past. Bear with me then, if I ask 
you to go back with me for a few moments to a period as far 
before them as the period of their settlement of IS'ew Haven is 
before us. Such a consideration of some of the historic 
forces which made them what they were may not be without 
its value. 



If we thus go back two hundred and fifty years before the 
founding of New Haven, we come to the fourteenth century. 
I wiU remind you that this was long before the discovery of 
America by Columbus. The nations of the continent of 
Europe had hardly emerged from the chaos of feudal warfare. 
The great nobles had still so much power that they were the 
rivals even of their sovereigns, and were ever combining 



against them or against each other, whenever ambition or some 
fancied grievance tempted them. The Church too had lost 
mnch of the power of a living faith. The ecclesiastical digni- 
taries had become, to a great extent, as mundane and as 
ambitious as the nobles. A large part of them had given 
themselves up to a life of self-indulgence. The gluttony of 
the monks was proverbial. St. Bernard, centuries before, 
complained that there were bishops who had so many different 
kinds of wine on their tables that it was impossible even so 
much as to taste the half of them. We read of the monks in 
a certain monastery who complained of their abbot because he 
had reduced their ordinary dinners from sixteen to thirteen 
dishes. As for the laity, there was no independent thought 
among them, no independent action. 

But things had begun everywhere to take an upward tend- 
ency. The commercial activity, started by the Crusades, had 
served to break down many of the barriers which had sepa- 
rated the people of different countries. The cities which had 
their rise in the twelfth century had acquired franchises and 
privileges, and the burghers had learned many lessons in 
freedom. Universities had been established, and though the 
learned doctors who had been trained in them expended their 
strength in the unprofitable word-splittings of the scholastic 
philosophy, yet learning was preserved, and the intellects of 
an ever increasing multitude of students were sharpened into 
activity. The Christian Church also, so democratic in its 
organization, which through the Middle Ages had been the 
protector of the weak against the strong, still, notwithstanding 
its degeneracy, preached the doctrines of kindness and charity, 
and was an ever present protest against the excesses of strife 
and violence. 

England, at the period to which we have gone back, was in 
many respects one of the least important of the States of 



Europe. In population it was far inferior. The mass of its 
inhabitants were occupied with the cultivation of the soil. 
The national wealth consisted in flocks, and herds, and the 
harvest of the year. Credit was unknown. To be sure, 
English sailors from the Cinque Ports had made themselves at 
home on the sea. A few manufactures were carried on, 
though they were of the rudest kind. But compared with the 
nations of Southern Europe, or with those great cities which 
were growing up in the Low Countries and in Italy, England 
held a very inconsiderable position. 

Its inhabitants were a coarse and even a brutal people. The 
grandees of the royal and imperial courts of Italy and of Con- 
stantinople, the merchant princes of Venice, of Genoa, of Pisa, 
of Bruges, and of Antwerp, looked on them as little better 
than barbarians. They were thoroughly rude and unculti- 
vated. The stock from which they had originally come was a 
coarse one. 'No one of the savage tribes which had overrun 
the Roman Empire was more fierce or more cruel than those 
Saxons, and Angles, and Jutes, and Frisians, who had come 
over from their primeval forests to ravage and butcher, and 
finally to settle themselves in that foggy island, which was 
naturally only a little more habitable than their own muddy 
swamps in Jutland. Mr. Taine has described them in language 
which it may be worth while to repeat : " Huge white bodies, 
cold blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen hair, raven- 
ous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese ; of a cold tempera- 
ment, prone to brutal drunkenness ! Pirates ! They had found 
that of all kinds of hunting, the man-hunt was the most profit- 
able and the most noble ! From that moment, sea-faring, war, 
and pillage became their ideal of a freeman's work. So they left 
the care of their land and flocks to the women, and in wretched 
boats of hide dashed to sea in their two sailed barks, and 
landed anywhere ; killed everything ; and having sacrificed in 
honor of Odin and Thor the tithe of their prisoners, and 



leaving behind them the red light of their burnings, went 
further on to begin again. ' Lord,' — says a certain litany — 
' deliver us from the fury of the Jutes !' Of all barbarians, 
they were the strongest of body, the most formidable, and the 
most cruelly ferocious." For centm-ies the descendants of 
these vikings had fought with the Britons, and fought with 
each other, and there had been little to elevate or refine them. 
In due time, they had accepted the Christian religion, and 
they had made some considerable advances towards civiliza- 
tion ; but a state of things still existed among them in the 
fourteenth century which to us at the present day seems little 
better than anarchy. It was the period of the " hundred years 
war " waged in France by the English kings for the possession 
of the throne of that country. During that war, English 
soldiers had become accustomed to deeds of outrage, and had 
been trained to the work of plunder, in all its various forms, — 
the pillage of farm h(»uses, the sack of cities, the ransom of 
captives ! The feeling common among them was expressed 
by the soldier who exclaimed : "If God had been a soldier 
nowadays, he would have been a marauder !" It is not sur- 
prising that on the return of these men to England, lawlessness 
and brutality reigned without check. The historian Green 
says of this period, that houses were sacked, judges were 
overawed or di-iven from the bench, peaceful men were hewn 
down by assassins or plundered by armed bands, women were 
carried off to forced marriages, elections were controlled by 
brute force, parliaments were degraded into camps of armed 
retainers. Hume says, "No subject could trust to the laws 
for protection. Men ojDenly associated themselves, under the 
patronage of some great baron, for their mutual defence. 
They wore public badges, by which their confederacy was 
distinguished. They supported each other in all quarrels, 
iniquities, extortions, murders, robberies, and other crimes. 
Their chief was more their sovereign than the king himself. 



There was perpetual turbulence, disorder, and faction." Jes- 
sopp, an English antiquary, says : " If a man had a claim on 
another for a debt, or a piece of land, or a right which was 
denied him, or even if he thought he had, he found no difficulty 
in getting together a score or two of ruffians to back him in 
taking the law into his own hands." The books are full of the 
stories of outrage and savagery, that were constantly occurring. 
The villein who had run away from his lord and become an 
outlaw, the broken soldier returning penniless from the wars, 
found shelter and wages in the homes of the greater barons, 
and furnished them with a force ready at any moment for 
violence or strife. It was the recognized custom of the time. 
It was even reduced to a system, and was known by the name 
of "maintenance." England was divided into numberless 
hostile camps. The state of things was little better than that 
of an armed truce. Every one was attached to some one of 
the warring factions, and these might come to blows any day 
on the slightest provocation. The yeomen and even the lords 
of the manor everywhere put on the livery of some powerful 
baron in order to be able to secure aid and patronage in any 
fray or suit in which they might be engaged. Mr. Green says 
that, even in Parliament itself, " the White Rose of the house 
of York, the Red Rose of the house of Lancaster, the port- 
cullis of the Beauforts, the pied bull of the ISTevils, the bear 
and ragged staff of the Beauchamps, were seen on hundreds of 
breasts." 

In further illustration of tlie condition of things in England 
at this time, Dr. Jessopp says that in a small parish in Norfolk 
a certain John de la Wade got together a band of men, 
invaded the manor of Hamon de Clem-e, seized the grain, 
threshed it, cut down the timber, and carried off the whole. 
He then describes at lengtli two other cases of a precisely 
similar kind which happened the same year in the same parish. 
He tells us also that two gentlemen of position went with 



twenty-five of their retainers to the Hall at Little Barningham, 
where lived an old lady, Petronilla de Gros, set fire to the 
house in five places, dragged the old lady out with brutal 
violence, and so worked upon her fears as to compel her to 
tell them where were her jewels and money. In another 
little parish, which he describes, he says the catalogue of 
crime for the year is so ghastly, — I use his own words, — " as 
positively to stagger one." I will not take any account of the 
minor offenses which, as he says, were brought to trial before 
the courts, or give the details of the worst crimes which he 
describes ; but he says that, in that small parish, in one year, 
eight men and four women were murdered, and that there 
were besides five fatal fights. 

The degree of civilization to which the people of England 
had then attained can be estimated from the way in which 
they lived. Dr. Jessopp tells us that the greater part of the 
people lived in houses which were no better than what we 
should call hovels. They were covered with turf, and some- 
times with thatch. None of them had chimneys. They had 
not even windows. The hole in the roof which let out the 
smoke rendered windows unnecessary. Even in the houses of 
the nobihty, windows were rare. Oiled hnen cloth served to 
admit a feeble semblance of hght and keep out the rain. In 
the houses of the laborers, the fire was in the middle, and 
around it the laborer and his wife and children huddled. 
Going to bed meant flinging themselves down on the straw, as 
now in a gypsy's tent. Dr. Jessopp says that the food of the 
majority of the people of England was of the coarsest descrip- 
tion. The poor man's loaf was black as mud and as tough as 
shoe leather. In the winter time, turf was burned ; but the 
horse and sheep and cattle were half starved for at least four 
months in the year, and one and all were much smaller than 
they are now. There were no potatoes, and the absence of 
vegetables for the greater part of the year, together with the 



10 

litter disregard of all hygienic laws, made diseases of all kinds 
frightfully common. As for the laborer's dress, it was a 
single garment, a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs bare, 
with a girdle of rope or leather tied round the waist, in which 
a knife was stuck to use sometimes in hacking his bread, some- 
times for stabbing an enemy in a quarrel. 

Dr. Jessopp adds that if the houses of the laborers were 
squalid, and dirty, and dark, the homes of the employers of 
labor were not much better. In the homes of the nobles and 
of the gentry, and in some of the more richly endowed of the 
monasteries, there might be more provision for comfort ; but, 
even centuries later, fresh straw was laid down daily in the 
palace of the king. Coarseness and want of refinement char- 
acterized the gentry and the nobles. Their ignorance was 
great. Their tastes were low. Anthony Wood, the historian 
of the University of Oxford, tells a story of a baron of that 
day at whose castle two students presented themselves and 
sought an introduction by sending in their academical creden- 
tials, in which, among other accomplishments, they were 
described as gifted with a poetical vein. But so far was the 
baron disposed to treat them with the slightest respect, that 
he ordered that they should be put in two buckets over a well 
and be dipped alternately into the water until each should 
produce a couplet on his awkward situation. The historian 
says that it was not till after a considerable number of duck- 
ings that the unfortunate students finished the rhymes, while 
the baron and his retainers stood around during the process of 
concoction, and made themselves merry over these involuntary 
ascents and descents. 



I have carried you back with me in English history just 
about as far before the time of the landing on these shores of 
the founders of this town, as the period of their landing is 



11 

before this anniversary occasion. I have done this because in 
order to form any adequate conception of what they and the 
other men of the seventeenth century were, it is necessary to 
understand what the men of England were who preceded them 
in the fourteenth century. Just as to have any proper appre- 
ciation of the sun in its early dawn, while it is still struggling 
with the mists of morning and its rays are obscured and the 
air is damp and chill, it is necessary to go back, in thought at 
least, to the thick darkness that one short hour before covered 
all. It would seem as if it were hardly necessary to remind 
you that, according to the unalterable laws of nature, the 
dawn with all its incompleteness must ever precede the day. 
Yet there have always been, and always will be, sentimental 
people, who dissatisfied with the dull routine of their lives, 
will delight to deceive themselves, and will plaintively sigh 
for the good old days, and imagine that, at some remote period 
in the past, there was a fabulous age, in which the early dawn 
lighted up and gilded the world as gloriously as the sun in mid 
heavens. But this is all a dream. The facts stubbornly refuse 
to countenance a behef in any such period. They point to 
the future as the only golden age. It is because so many 
persons have not understood this, that they have actually sup- 
posed w^hen they have heard of the darkness of the past, of 
its narrowness, its bigotry, its cruelty, that these were the 
special characteristics of the Puritans, that it was the Puritans 
who were in some way responsible for all that is so repulsive ; 
when it was the Puritans who, although not entirely free from 
the effects of the influences under which they had been edu- 
cated, grappled, with resolute and intrepid spirit, with the 
abuses of their time, and sought to clear them away and bring 
in something better. 

The description I have given of England in the fourteenth 
century is very imperfect. Any description, so brief as such 
an hour as this allows, must be entirely inadequate. Yet 



12 

perhaps it has served to remind you what thick darkness then 
covered England. That century and the centuries before it 
have been called the centuries of death. They were so indeed ! 
Yet perhaps they might better be called centuries of birth. 
But the processes by which the development of life proceeded 
were so painfully slow tliat we grow weary as we trace them 
in our histories, and even from century to century we can 
hardly assure ourselves that there has been any substantial 
progress ; or scarcely that there is any life at all, — death and 
life seem to contend together so long for the mastery. To 
watch the struggle between the new Kfe and the old death is 
like watching the slow coming on of the belated spring. 

With our idea of the orderly ongoing of the business of life 
in a civilized community, it is simply impossible to understand 
the contrasts then presented in England. We have them 
described however by men whose testimony is unimpeachable, 
by men too who described them from different points of view 
and for different purposes. 'One of the witnesses is Wycliffe 
— a scholar who had been at first drawn away from his aca- 
demic studies by the necessity of appearing in the defence of 
the rights of the crown against Roman aggressions. As the 
struggle went on, he was brought to realize how little the 
church, as then constituted, was doing for the spiritual inter- 
ests of the people, and he conceived the idea of translating the 
Bible for their use. But the first of the reformers came too 
soon. Another contemporary witness is William Longland, 
the poet of the poor. A third is the genial Chaucer, — the 
poet of the brightest side of the life of the period. Longland 
and Chaucer have been called Puritan poets, though they lived 
before what is distinctively called the Puritan age. "7 They 
substantially agree as to the disheartening character of the 
outlook. Peterkin, the ploughman, pictures the woes of the 
laboring classes, the vices and the abuses that reigned every- 
where, and especially the moral destitution of the people. He 



13 

arraigns the cliiircli as responsible for it. He boldly attacks 
its corruptions. He pictures its worldliness, and the careless- 
ness of its dignitaries. He describes the hyj)Ocrisy, the ignor- 
ance, the insolence, the immorality of the ecclesiastics. He 
professes liimseK to be in despair, and finds his only comfort 
in the hope that there may yet be a thorough religious refor- 
mation. In opposition to all the perfunctory formalities 
prescribed by the church, he proclaims that a righteous life 
is far better than a host of indulgences. Chaucer draws 
attractive pictures of the well-to-do citizens of different ranks, 
the doctor, the man of law, the clerk, the franklin, the squire, 
the parson, the friar, the miller. He does this with a lightness 
and brilliancy of touch, with a geniality and human sympathy 
which has delighted all succeeding generations ; yet, through 
all, the seK-indulgence and indolence and carelessness of the 
ecclesiastics are plainly revealed, and their neglect of the 
spiritual interests confided to their care. With these witnesses 
before us, the question cannot but arise, how could the Eng- 
land of Piers Ploughman, and the England of Chaucer exist 
side by side ? That they did, there can be no question. I 
have thought that the strange contrasts which then existed, 
and which Lon gland and Chaucer reveal, are perhaps well 
illustrated by the scenes in an English novel, which not long 
ago was widely read and admired ; though it describes a very 
different period of English history. I refer to a picture of 
English rural life, most attractive in many respects, as it 
existed in the latter part of the seventeenth century. I refer 
to Lorna Doone, written by R. D. Blackmore. Those of you 
who have read the work will remember that the reader is 
introduced into the charming home of an English yeoman. 
Nothing in English literature is more beautiful than the 
description which is given of the order and regularity with 
which everything proceeds in this almost ideal farm house. 
But within a few miles live a nest of brutal outlaws, — all men, 



14 

it is well to notice, in whose veins flow the blood of the 
nobility of England. These outlaws subsist by regular sys- 
tematic robbery. There is no farm house that is not at any 
time in danger of a visitation ; no family that is not liable to 
be waked at night and to find ricks, and barns, and the house 
itself, in a blaze ; no family that does not know that if they 
have gained for themselves the enmity of these men, they may 
be exposed, as they attempt to make their escape, — men, 
woixien, and children, — to the merciless shots of these mid- 
night marauders. This was the state of things in England 
half a century after 'New England was settled. ]N"ow in the 
fourteenth century it was immeasurably worse. Brigandage 
in a hundred forms was almost an every day occurrence. No 
pack wagon carried merchandise on any road of England, from 
town to town, without the protection of an armed guard. 
Yet, notwithstanding every precaution, it was liable to be 
stopped on the highway by a stronger force, its contents seized 
and carried off. Dr. Jessopp says of this period, after a detail 
of particulars which are too revolting for repetition : " It is 
impossible to realize the hideous ferocity of the state of society 
at this time. The women were as bad as the men, furious 
beldames, dangerous as wild beasts, without pity, without 
shame, and withoi^t remorse, who finding life so cheerless, so 
hopeless, so very, very dark and miserable, when nothing else 
was to be gained by killing anyone else, killed themselves." 
And yet at that very time the courts were everywhere open. 
Judges rode their circuits, and bishops made their regular 
visitations. Such were the amazing contrasts that England 
presented in the fourteenth century. 



I shall not undertake to give anything like a description of 
events between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries ; 
but I will remind you that of the two hundred and fifty years 



15 

between 1388 and the landing of that company of English 
Christians on these shores, the whole of the first half was 
little better than the fourteenth century. During a great part 
of it, the period of the Wars of the Roses, it was actually in 
many respects worse. It is true that there was progress, but 
it was hardly apparent at the time. At the end of the next 
hundred years, however, about the close of the sixteenth 
centuiy, or at the close of the reign of Queen EKzabeth, a 
great change had become apparent. But you will notice that 
we have now come quite down to the time of the birth of 
John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, and it is for this 
reason that we are interested to inquire what were the forces 
during the sixteenth century that brought about the change 
from the darkness of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 
What were the influences under which the characters of the 
founders of New Haven were formed ? 

lln attempting to answer this question, I remind you that 
England had been almost the last country in Europe to feel 
the effects of the intellectual regeneration which commenced 
in Italy on the arrival of the Greek scholars, who had fled 
from Constantinople upon its capture by the Turks in the 
fifteenth century. > In each of the countries of Southern 
Europe, the effects of the " new learning," as it was called, 
which these Greek scholars brought, were felt in the stimulus 
that it gave to thought. Taine says, " Men then opened their 
eyes for the first time and saw." The first effect in each 
country was to destroy all interest in the native literature, 
which till then had given delight. But soon a new literature 
arose, far more vigorous, and so full of freshness and beauty 
that it is still the admiration of the world. But, among those 
southern nations, the " new learning " to a great extent ex- 
pended its power in the domain of literature. Yet it is to be 
noticed that, even in its influence on literature, its effects 
varied in different countries according to the race character- 



16 

istics of the people. So in England, the effects of the " new 
learning" were felt in the line of the race characteristics of 
that people. But as the English were not predisposed to any 
special interest in the beautiful, in any of its forms, the revival 
in England was not at all of a literary or of an artistic char- 
acter. The English were a practical people, and so the revival 
among them was distinguislied by the effects which it pro- 
duced in a practical way upon what had been from the first 
their strongest race characteristics — tlieir religious spirit and 
the spirit of freedom which animated them. In England, the 
effect of the new learning was to give a new and rapid devel- 
opment to each of these. 



/. The first of these race characteristics of the English people 
of which I will speak was their interest in religion. This was 
one of the marked characteristics of our Teutonic ancestors, 
when we first hear of them among the German forests. They 
had a predisposition to take serious views of life and to ponder 
the questions which relate to the hereafter. The people of 
Southern Europe were satisfied with the sensuous beauty of 
the visible. In the gloomy North, nature was everywhere so 
wild and savage that men seem to have been disposed to look 
beyond it, and, instead of resting in the contemplation of the 
visible which was so forbidding, to think of the Being to 
whom Nature owed its origin — a Being infinitely great, who 
could only be apprehended by the reverent mind. In the 
Eddas are preserved their first rude ideas. Coarse people, as 
they were, they loved to dwell on such high themes as Right, 
Duty, Responsibility, Honor, Heroism, SeK-Sacrifice. Tacitus 
tells us that their preference was to live sohtary, each one near 
the spring or the wood which had taken his fancy. Even 
when they dwelt in villages, each family lived apart. Each 
Teuton thought for himself. ', Each Teuton acted for himself. 



17 

All were distinguished for their reticence, their personal inde- 
pendence, their manly dignity, their marked individuality. To 
them life presented itself as a warfare, and in the Sagas it is 
the man who is loyal to the right, and is willing to sacrifice 
self, that is held np as worthy of the highest praise. I quote 
from a description of a warrior who in battle had refused to 
save himself, when his chief was in danger. He is represented 
as saying "I will not budge hence. I mean to die by my 
lord's side, near this man I have loved so much." Then we 
are told, " This warrior kept his word, the word he had given 
to his chief. He had sworn that they should either return to 
their homes together safe and sound, or that they should both 
fall together in the thick of the carnage, covered with wounds." 
The Saga closes : " The dead warrior lay by his chief's side, a 
faithful servant." After the old vikings had come to England 
to live, the first glimpse that we have of their descendants 
shows that they w^ere true to their race instincts. Christian 
missionaries visited them, and addressed their king, as he was 
entertaining his chiefs at a feast. When the missionary had 
finished, a warrior arose and said : " You remember, O King, 
that which sometimes happens in winter when you are seated 
at table with your earls and thanes. Your fire is lighted, and 
your hall is warm, and without is rain and snow and storm. 
Then comes a swallow flying across the hall. He enters by 
one door and leaves by another. The brief moment while he 
is within is pleasant to him. He feels not rain nor cheerless 
wintry weather ; but the moment is brief. The bird flies 
away in the twinkling of an eye, and he passes from winter to 
winter. Such methinks is the life of man on earth com]3ared 
with the uncertain time beyond. It appears for a while, but 
what is the time which comes after, what the time which was 
before ? We know not. If then, this new doctrine may teach 
us somewhat of greater certainty, it were well that we should 
regard it." The high priest then declared in presence of them 



18 

all, that the old gods were powerless, that he knew nothing of 
that which he adored ; and among the first, lance in hand, he 
assisted to demolish the temple where they had before wor- 
shiped. 

This interest in the " time which comes after " and " the 
time which was before," this desire to attain to greater cer- 
tainty abont the great questions which relate to the unseen 
and the hereafter never ceased to characterize the descendants 
of those old vikings. The lament of Piers Ploughman, and 
the writings of Wicliffe, even the gay verses of Chaucer, give 
evidence of the hold which these same ideas had on the Eng- 
lish mind, even in those centuries when the church was most 
forgetful of its responsibilities. So when the " new learning " 
had begun in Italy to attract attention, we find that the men 
who first went there to study, Grocyn, Linacre, John Colet, 
did not go there simply for purposes connected with litera- 
ture. It was for a very different object. They looked upon 
the Greek language as a key that would enable them to un- 
lock the true meaning of the I^ew Testament, in which they 
hoped to find that which would serve for the spiritual enlight- 
enment of their countrymen. They kept this end steadily in 
view. Uninfluenced by the semi-infidel scholars with whom 
they came in contact, they remained true to the special object 
for which they had left their homes, and on their return to 
England, established themselves in the universities, and 
began with enthusiasm to expound the Gospel and the 
Epistles of St. Paul. They soon preached a new theology, 
not founded on the Fathers and the Schoolmen, but on the 
words of Scripture. They were met by a storm of opposition 
from the ecclesiastics. They replied by demanding that there 
should be a reform of life among the clergy. Colet, at the 
direction of Archbishop Warham, addressed Convocation, and 
said : " Would that for once you would remember your name 
and profession and take thought for the reformation of the 



19 

Church ! Never was it more necessary and never did the state 
of the church need more vigorous endeavors ! We are trou- 
bled with heretics ; but no heresy is so fatal to us and to the 
people at large as the vicious and depraved lives of the clergy. 
That is the worst heresy of all. The reform of the bishops 
must precede the reform of the clergy. The reform of the 
clergy will lead to a general revival of religion among the 
people at large. The accumulation of benefices, the luxury 
and worldliness of the priesthood, must be abandoned. The 
prelates should preach, should forsake the court, and labor in 
their own dioceses. Care should be taken for the ordination 
and promotion of worthy ministers. Residence should be en- 
forced. The low standard of clerical morality should be 
raised." 

As the "new learning" spread, the attack on the ecclesias- 
tics was taken up by others, prominent among whom was 
Erasmus, who wrote the " Praise of Folly," in which he ex- 
posed with such wit and eloquence the ignorance and the 
bigotry of the ecclesiastics, that to this day it holds its place 
as a classic. Colet, at his own expense, established a grammar 
school in London. His example was everywhere followed. 
Henry YIII., Edward YI., Elizabeth, went on with the work, 
a,nd grammar schools were opened all over England. Every- 
where there was seen an intellectual quickening. Parallel with 
this there was going on also an increase of wealth in the coun- 
try. EngHsh merchants began to trade with all the cities of 
Europe. English ships were sent into the Baltic and crossed 
the Ocean. Manufactures began to receive attention. A 
social revolution was beginning to make itself felt, which was 
not confined to London. In all the towns of England wealth 
increased and men set higher value on education and intel- 
ligence. 

Just at this moment, the friends of the " new learning " 
were able to give to the English people the Bible, which under 



20 

the Roman system had been nnknown among then, except to 
a few of the priesthood. In Germany, Luther had been a 
monk for years, when by an accident, as he was dusting the 
library of his monastery, he happened upon a copy of it. So 
in England, if the Bible had been known to the ecclesiastics, 
they had made no practical use of it. The Bible therefore 
came like a new revelation to a people who were thirsting for 
instruction. It was received as a fresh and inspired disclosure 
of the mind and will of God. The reverent submission which 
men had in former times been disposed to yield to the church 
was now at once transferred to that book. In place of the 
church, the Bible was accepted as the sole and sufficient 
authority. It served to assure the most humble believer that 
he might approach the Creator in direct and personal commun- 
ion without the intercession of any so-called saint, and without 
the help of any priest. 

But what gave the Bible its special power was its adaptation 
to the strongest of the race characteristics of the English 
people, the English predisposition to religion — the English con- 
ception of each man's own individuality and each man's own 
personal responsibility. 

It may be said that the Bible has shown itself to be adapted 
to the race characteristics of every people. This is undoubt- 
edly true, and this fact has even sometimes been urged as one 
of the proofs of its divine origin. It certainly has shown 
itself to be a book for the world, for all people. The Hugue- 
not in France ; the Camisards among the mountains of the 
Cevennes ; the Waldenses in Italy ; the Germans in the time 
of Luther ; the people of Hindoostan and of the Islands of the 
Sea, the old and the young, the prosperous and the unfortu- 
nate, the joyful and the sad, in all generations, in all periods 
of life, and under all circumstances, have found that it meets 
their m}Tiad experiences and necessities, and in each new joy 
or sorrow, the devout believer finds in it solace, encourage- 



21 

ment, or warning. Before our Civil War, liow often were we 
told that there was something in the Old Testament which 
took hold, in a wonderful manner, of the imaginations of the 
slaves of the South. The story of the exodus, the journey in 
the wilderness, the denunciations of the prophets against 
the oppressor, the encouraging words of the Psalmist, the 
glorious pictures of the ]^ew Jerusalem in the Book of Reve- 
lation, seemed just adapted to meet all the pecuhar sorrows 
and uU the hopes of that imaginative race. This is all true. 
Yet it does seem as if no people have ever found their race 
characteristics more completely met by the Bible than the 
English in the sixteenth century. In exact harmony with 
their ideas of individualism, which are as old as the race, it 
seemed to address itself to each one personally. It told him 
of his individual obligations to God. It presented God as a 
governor, as the giver of a perfect law, which every man knew 
he had broken. It presented a remedy oifered by God, by 
which the majesty of law could be upheld and yet man might 
be saved. It met his views of duty, of right, of self-sacrifice. 
It is difficult for us to appreciate the enthusiasm with which 
the Bible was received by the English people. Our literature 
is so varied. Books of every description are so numerous, 
tliat only to hear of a new book often almost wearies us. Yet 
even in these later times, a book sometimes absorbs the atten- 
tion of a whole people and moulds public opinion in a way 
that we can hardly understand. Mr. John Morley — in speak- 
ing of the appearance of a book written by a popular author 
just before the French Revolution of 1798, which has been 
sometimes numbered among the causes which helped to bring 
on that crisis among the French people — says : " The book- 
sellers were unable to meet the demand ; the book was let 
out at the rate of twelve sous a volume, and the volume could 
not be detained above an hour. All classes shared the ex- 
citement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and bourgeois. Stories 



22 

were told of fine ladies dressed for the ball, who took up the 
book for half an hour, until the time should come for starting, 
who read until midnight, and when informed that the car- 
riage waited, answered not a word, and when reminded by 
and by that it was two o'clock, still read on." Now it is to 
be noticed that this book of which Mr. Morley speaks, was 
only one book, and it appeared in France at a time when there 
was already an abundant national literature. But the Bible 
is more than a single book. Within its covers is the whole 
national literature of the Hebrew people. "Legend and 
annal, war song and psalm, state roll and biography, the 
mighty voices of prophets, the parables of evangehsts, stories 
of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the 
heathen, philosophic argument, apocalyptic vision ; and all 
these were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the 
most part by any rival learning." He wlio thinks of the Bible 
as a single book, loses much of the impression which it is 
calculated to make. It is in reality a collection of more than 
sixty books, and when those sixty books were first given to 
the English people, and Cranmer's Bible was ordered to be 
read publicly in the churches, crowds rushed to hear it. Still 
more, when in 1576 the little Geneva Bible — then printed for 
the first time in Roman type, and in a form which could be 
carried by each man to his own home — was read by those 
who had httle else to read, the efliect was felt throughout the 
whole nation, and the whole conception of religion was 
changed. 

Of the reality and extent of this change we have proof in 
the burst of welcome, with which in 1590, the great poem of 
Edmund Spenser was hailed — " The Faery Queen." In his 
earlier verses, Spenser had dared to hold up Archbishop 
Grindal, who was in disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as 
the model of what a Christian bishop should be. In this new 
poem, he sought to describe the efforts of the man who is 



23 

seeking to obtain tlie divine favor, and says that the character 
which is pleasing to God must bear the " lineaments of gospel 
books." The poem is a stor}^ of knight errantry, in the form 
of an allegory. In conformity with the popular taste, Spenser 
assigns a knightly champion to each virtue, and each of these 
knights is represented as entering upon the struggle with 
some particular form of sin. Mr. Green says that the poem 
both in its conception and in the way that the conception is 
realized, "struck the note of the coming Puritanism." It 
was " Puritan to the core." It at once became " the delight 
of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every poet, 
the solace of every soldier." Milton, a generation or two 
later, addressing the Parliament of England, said that Spenser 
was " a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." John Wesley, 
giving directions for the clerical studies of his Methodist dis- 
ciples, recommended them to combine with the study of the 
Hebrew Bible and the Greek Testament, the reading of the 
"Faery Queen." Mr. Keble, the poet of the "Clmstian 
Year," describes the " Faery Queen " as " a continual, deliber- 
ate endeavor to enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feel- 
ing of an inquiring and romantic age on the side of goodness 
and faith, of purity and justice." The wonderful popularity 
of such a poem is proof of the strength of the religious feel- 
ing which pervaded all classes of the English people at the 
close of the sixteenth century. 



/l pass now to another of the race characteristics of the 
English people, which was perhaps as strong as their pre- 
disposition to religion — their love of freedom. Tacitus bears 
testimony to the fact, that when the Eomans first came in 
contact with our Teutonic ancestors, liberty was reaUy a pas- 
sion with them, and certainly, down to the accession of the 
Tudor princes, nothing had ever occurred to break the free 



24: 

spirit which their ancestors brought from the forests of Ger- 
many. Notwithstanding what is called the " Norman Con- 
quest," the inhabitants of England had never been depressed 
by the feeling that they were a conquered people. The " Nor- 
man Conquest " had proved a great blessing. It had served 
to unite all the various branches of the great Teutonic family, 
who had successively made homes for themselves on English 
soil with the aboriginal Britons. It had built up an English 
people. AU the old distinctions of Saxon, and Mercian, and 
Northumbrian had been forever swept away by the coming 
of the Norman, and by the strong rule which he extended 
over all. And now, at last, in the fourteenth centmy, even 
the distinction of Norman and Saxon had passed away. 
There is not a word in Magna Charta which refers to any 
difference between the two races. Both are spoken of as 
English. The people of England are recognized as one 
people. 

The present generation of English speaking people has 
derived its ideas on this subject to a great extent from the 
romances of Sir Walter Scott ; but Mr. Freeman tells us that 
there is not a line in the charming novel of Ivanhoe which 
does not convey an erroneous impression with respect to the 
relations of the Saxons to the Normans. Notwithstanding 
the Conquest, the institutions of the land remained English. 

The local, judicial, and administrative forms of government 
in the fourteenth century were practically the same as in the 
sixteenth century. After three centuries, the conquerors were 
themselves conquered. Though they had introduced a third 
part of the words into the language, the language continued 
to be English. Their descendants spoke English. Enghsh 
blood had gained the predominance everywhere over the 
Norman blood. The nation itseK remained English. By the 
fourteenth century, the soil of England was almost entirely in 
the hands of men who could trace their descent to the very 



25 

Anglo-Saxon proprietors who had been in possession before 
the coming of the I^ormans. It is not to be forgotten that, at 
the time of the Conquest, AVilliam claimed to have a legal 
right to the throne. Mr. Freeman tells us that it is utterly 
unjust to speak of this claim of legal right and his show of a 
legal government as mere pretence to cover the violence of a 
successful brigand. It is true that his position was different 
from the position of a king of foreign birth who succeeds to 
a crown by peaceable election or peaceable hereditary succes- 
sion. But Mr. Freeman says it was also very different from 
the position of a mere invader reigning by sheer mihtary force. 
If England had been oppressed, it was to a great extent the 
undesigned oppression which had only arisen from the fact 
that their laws had been administered by foreigners. Mr. 
Freeman insists that the notion that every Englishman at the 
Conquest was turned out of hearth and home is a mere dream. 
The men who actually fought against William at Senlac were 
undoubtedly dispossessed to a great extent ; but the actual 
occupiers of the soil remained in general undisturbed. In 
some cases Enghshmen of high rank contrived even to win 
William's personal favor and kept their lands and even their 
offices. Thousands of proprietors redeemed their land by 
a payment of money to the new king and went back to 
their homes rejoicing. As Mr. Freeman expresses it, " They 
had been in the lion's mouth and had come forth unhurt." 
Those who received their estates back received them of course 
according to the prevalent feudal ideas, as a fresh gift from 
the over-lord ; and different proprietors doubtless received them 
back on different terms according to the merits or demerits of 
each particular grantee. Some received them as a free gift. 
Some bought them back. Some acquired the whole of their 
former lands ; others a part. Some even received a fresh gift 
beyond what they originally possessed. In some cases, a 
widow or an heiress saved a great estate by consenting to give 



herself and her lands in marriage to one of the friends of the 
conqueror. So at the end of the fourteenth century, when 
there had come about the thorough amalgamation of the 
ITormans with the great body of the Enghsh people, there 
were few landed proprietors, even among those who bore 
Norman names, who could not trace back their pedigree, at 
least on one side, to the original Anglo-Saxon proprietors of 
the soil. 

Now these men possessed the independent spirit of free- 
men, and they displayed the virtues which usually accompany 
freedom. They were brave, outspoken, truthful. They were 
capable of strong and lasting friendships. They were ever 
ready to make sacrifices for any object that seemed to demand 
it. They had an ever present feeling of obligation to what 
they considered their duty, and a disposition to be loyal to 
their chief. And this spirit was not confined to them. It 
was shared to a great extent by the people at large. The 
English people were a free people. Neither in theory nor in 
practice did their kings possess absolute power. The preroga- 
tives of the king were great, but he could not legislate ; he 
could not imj)ose the lightest tax without the consent of Par- 
liament. He was bound to administer the government accord- 
ing to the laws of the land, and immemorial custom. The 
line which bounded the royal prerogative was not drawn with 
any great distinctness, but even William the Conqueror, as has 
just been said, took pains to have it understood that he would 
conform to English law. King John, that " knight without 
truth," as he has been called, that " king without justice, that 
Christian without faith," attempted to disregard the laws, and 
all classes rose up against him, and he thought himself for- 
tunate in appeasing their anger by signing at Runnymede the 
Great Charter. I need hardly remind you that this was not 
a new or a different code of laws, but merely a formal recog- 
nition of the great and fundamental principles on which the 



27 

government had rested from time immemorial. It was a 
written ratification of the traditions and ciistoms of the land, 
and of all the liberties which had been conferred by his prede- 
cessors. After that, the most self-willed of English kings were 
very careful to pay the utmost respect to the laws, though they 
often sought to accomplish their designs by some kind of eva- 
sion. Mr. Macaulay says, that so long as the general spirit of 
the administration was mild and popular, the people allowed 
much latitude to the sovereign ; but to this indulgence there 
was a limit. It would not do for a king to presume too far on 
the forbearance of the peojtle. If for ends generally allowed 
to be good he overstepped the constitutional hue, they forgave 
him ; but they claimed the privilege of overstepping this line 
themselves. If he did it contrary to their ideas of what was 
for the general good, they appealed to the laws, and that 
appeal failing, they appealed to the god of battles. They 
kept this check of physical force always ready, and brought 
the proudest and fiercest king to terms. Resistance was the 
ordinary method in political disturbances. 

This bold and free spirit that was so generally diffused 
among all classes of the English people was owing, in great 
measure, to the fact that there had never been any exclusive 
spirit of caste which had separated the nobles from the rest 
of the nation. In the States on the Continent, the descend- 
ants of a person of noble rank were themselves noble, and 
an almost insuperable barrier separated them forever from the 
people, and the people from them. In those States there 
were only two classes, nobles and peasants. But in England, 
the nobility were constantly receiving fresh members from 
the people and constantly sending down members to mingle 
with the people. Knighthood might be reached by any one 
who could amass an estate and showed valor on the field of 
battle. The daughter of even a royal duke might marry a 
commoner. Any gentleman might become a peer. The 



younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. The grandson of 
a peer yielded precedence to a newly made knight. Good 
blood was held in high respect, but between good blood and 
the peerage, nothing barred the way but merit. Mr. Macaulay 
tells us that even in that age there were pedigrees and scutch- 
eons out of the house of lords as old as the oldest within. 
There were new men who bore the highest titles. There were 
untitled men who were descended from men who bore the 
highest titles. There were Mowbrays, Veres, Bohuns, and 
even kinsmen of Plantageuets, who had not one civil privi- 
lege beyond those of any shop-keeper or any farmer in the 
land. 

This fact that there had never been any impassable line 
between patricians and plebeians is so important in its bearing 
on the English character, that perhaps it will not be out of 
place to give some illustrations di-awn from the condition of 
things in different classes of English society. It will not be 
necessary to enter into any detailed account of the more min- 
ute subdivisions of these classes at the period of the Plan- 
tagenet princes. It will be enough for my purpose to take 
only the broadest division, — that alluded to by Mr, Hallam. 
He reminds his readers that there survives at the present day 
among aU English speaking children a string of words which, 
are generally supposed to be meaningless, but which have 
really come down from a very remote period, as a " distribu- 
tive enumeration " of what were then the different classes of 
English society. The words are "gentleman, apothecary, 
ploughman, thief." Under the title "gentleman" were in- 
cluded the greater and lesser nobility, and the lords of the 
manor, who may be considered as petty kings distributed all 
over England, holding subjects under them of different ranks. 
Under the title of " ploughman " were included two classes. 
There was the yeoman, who lived on his own" acres and culti- 
vated his own land, which he either owned absolutely, or for 



29 

which he paid yearly to the lord of the manor a small 
nominal sum of money, not as rent, but simply as an acknowl- 
edgment of his lordship. There was also a class lower in 
the social scale, who paid "rent and were obliged to perform 
certain menial duties. These last were the villeins, who were 
bound to the soil, and were unable to leave it or change their 
condition without the license of the lord of the manor, 
" Apothecary " was a term which was applied to the burgesses 
of the towns. The " thief " was a villein who owed allegiance 
to the lord of the manor, but had either become a vagabond or 
had fled to the " greenwood " and was living the life of an 
outlaw. 

Now for illustration of this fact, that among- all these diifer- 
ent classes of society there was no impassable barrier between 
patrician and plebeian, I take down the biography of the 
first person whose name occurs to me at random, among those 
remarkable men who made the glory of the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth. I read as follows : " In a poor farm-house among 
the pleasant valleys of South Devon, among the white apple 
orchards and the rich water meadows, and the red fallows and 
the red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born as 
beautiful as day, and christened Walter Raleigh, His father 
was a gentleman of ancient blood ; none older in the land ; 
but impoverished, he had settled down uj)on the wreck of his 
estate in that poor farm-house. His mother was a Champer- 
noun, proudest of IS'orman squires, and could probably boast 
of having in her veins the blood of Courtneys, Emperors of 
Constantinople." 

I turn next to the account which Bishop Latimer himself 
gave of his own childhood. He says, " My father was a yeoman 
and had no lands of his own. He hired a farm of three or 
four pounds by the year, and hereupon he tilled so much as 
kept half a dozen men. He had walk for one hundred sheep, 
and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did 



30 

find the king a harness with himself and his horse. I can 
remember that I buckled his harness when he went to Black- 
heath Field, He kept me in school. He married my sisters 
with five pounds apiece, so that he brought them up in godli- 
ness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neigh- 
bor, and some alms he gave to the poor." 

Perhaps I have made the mistake of drawing these illustra- 
tions from the period of the Tudor princes. The condition 
of English society at that time, in other respects, was very 
different, as I will soon attempt to show. But my object has 
been only to call attention to the fact that in every age of 
English history, there has been this thorough amalgamation 
going on between patrician and plebeian, in both the ascend- 
ing and descending scale so that in the poor farm-houses 
might be found the descendants of the highest nobles ; and 
side by side those who were themselves of plebeian descent who 
were rising to the highest positions in England. I will there- 
fore take one more illustration from the lowest class of society, 
that of the villeins in the time of the Plantagenets. Dr. 
Jessopp tells us of a certain Ealph Red, who in the thirteenth 
century was a villein on the lands of the lord of the manor in 
one of the villages of l^orfolk. He had a son Ralph, who 
having been admitted to the priesthood, became in conse- 
quence enfranchised. After a time this son, having acquired 
the means, purchased the freedom of his father and his 
father's family. A hunderd years afterwards, a descendant 
of this same Ralph Red became himself lord of the very 
manor on which his ancestor Ralph Red had been a villein. 
And the daughter of this lord of the manor married a learned 
judge of the time, Sir William Yelverton, a knight of the 
Bath. Erom them are descended Lord Avonmore and the 
Yelvertons, wlio are now Earls of Sussex. 

Now this absence, from the first period of English history, 
of any insuperable barrier between patricians and plebeians, 



81 

and the possibility of tlie intermingling of whatever there was 
of good blood in the land with that of every other class, had 
wrought important results on the character of the whole 
English people. It is an illustration on a large scale of the 
effect of natural laws, now recognized by the science of 
heredity. Blood tells among men as truly as among animals. 
The whole body of English people had felt the effects down 
to the very villeins. Many of those qualities which were 
elsewhere deemed to be the characteristics of patricians alone, 
were in England to be found among plebeians — individuality, 
personal dignity, independence, a sense of honor, an interest 
in the State of which every one felt himself a part, aspiration, 
self -confidence — all the qualities which are to-day recognized 
as the national characteristics of Englishmen. 

In the States of Europe, the nobles were a caste. They were 
kept by themselves. All outside of this caste were peasants. 
There was nothing to elevate them or give them hope. The 
histories of the time describe them as degraded almost to the 
level of the swine and oxen which they tended. No matter 
how enterprising or thrifty they were, they could not rise. 
Their condition in the Middle Ages may be judged from the 
condition of the serfs in Russia to-day, whom an English poet 
has lately thus described : — 

The serf is in his hut ; the unsacred sire 

Who can beget no honor ! Lo, his mate 

Dim through the reeking garlick, she whose womb 

Doth shape his ignorant shame, and whose young slave 

In some far field thickens a knouted hide 

For baser generations. Their dull eyes 

Are choked with feudal warfare; their rank limbs 

Steam in the stye of plenty. Their rude tongues 

That fill the belly from the common trough, 

Discharge in gobbets of as gross a speech, 

That other maw, the heart. Nor doth the boor 

Refuse his owner's chattel, though she breed 

The rich man's increase; nor doth she disdain 



32 

The joyless usage of such limbs as toil, 
Yoked with the nobler ox, and take as mute 
A beast's infliction. At her stolid side 
The girl that shall be such a thing as she 
Suckles the babe she would not, with the milk 
A bondmaid owes her master. 

Now there was no such class of people in England whose 
lot was so hopeless. Even the villems caught something of 
the prevailing feeling of independence. The bold outlaws of 
the "greenwood," so famous in English story, were largely- 
recruited from this class, and the knowledge that their children 
might rise to a higher condition was always a source of hope 
and courage. Besides, they shared in that general spirit of 
independence which had been so generally diffused among the 
whole people. English historians of the Middle Ages have 
recognized fully the importance of the existence in England 
of what they call the great middle class, so unlike and so 
superior to any body of men to be found elsewhere in Europe 
in that age. But the existence of this middle class is some- 
thing to be itseK explained. Why was there this middle class ? 
Was it not the result of the intermingling of the best blood 
of England with that of all classes ? So it was that whenever 
in those ages English soldiers contended with the soldiers of 
the continent, the effects of these characteristics were so often 
to be seen. It was this that gave the victory to the English 
at Crecy, at Poictiers, at Agincourt. The spirit of the EngHsh 
yeoman was something different from that of the European 
serf. There was a feeling of honor, of independence, and 
above all, as a race characteristic, the feeling of individual 
' responsibihty, of individual obhgation, to stand firm. There 
was no panic, for each man depended on himself and did not 
wait for support from some one else. It was just this same 
quality that kept the Enghsh squares firm at Waterloo. Mr. 
Kinglake, describing the battle of the Alma, in the Crimean 



33 

"War, says that the Kussian officers had been till then accus- 
tomed to think that the formation of troops for battle must be 
in crowded masses. Such was the formation on which the 
French and the Turks depended. It was therefore with 
amazement that the Russians saw the " men in red " coming 
on "in a slender line, onlj two deep, yet extending far 
from east to west." They could not believe that "with 
so fine a thread" — as he expresses it — the English general 
was really intending to confront their massive columns. N'one 
but men who have nerve and pluck can stand without flinch- 
ing in such a Kne, and such nerve and pluck are the result of 
race characteristics. 

These race characteristics are so important for the purpose 
which I have in view, that I cannot forbear another illustra- 
tion of it, as manifested by one of the latest descendants of 
the principal leader of that very company of English Chris- 
tians who founded this town, I remind you of a young officer 
of artillery, one of the most brilliant of those brilliant young 
men from this town, who laid down their lives on the field of 
battle in the Civil War, and one still remembered with loving 
affection by many here present, who confidently expected for 
him, after having been trained under these elms in every 
academic and every manly accomplishment, a long career of 
usefulness. In one of the fiercest of the battles of the 
Wilderness, he received an order to take and hold a danger- 
ous position with his battery. He asked " Am I to have any 
support?" He was told that no support could be given him. 
" Then," was his reply, as he went to what proved the gates 
of death, " I will support myself." That was the spirit which 
has ever characterized the Anglo-Saxon people ; a spirit which 
can only be built up by years of freedom. " I will support 
myseK !" " We run after nobody !" That is the spirit which 
characterizes all branches of the Teutonic family on this side 
of the Atlantic, as well as the other. 



34 

I have now called attention to two of the strongest race 
characteristics of the English people, and it is evident that 
they had not been weakened during the time of the Plantage- 
nets. I come now to the Tudors. They were inclined to be 
despotic ; but even under the Tudors, the spirit of the English 
people remained the same ; and their confidence that they 
were entitled to all the rights granted by Magna Charta and 
immemorial custom suffered no diminution. The Tudors were 
so situated that they did not dare to go beyond a certain point. 
They never carried arbitrary rule too far. They showed dis- 
cretion. They always stood in a kind of awe of their subjects. 
This was in great nieasure due to the fact that England was an 
island. As it was protected from invasion by the sea, it was 
unnecessary for the king to have a regular army. On the 
continent where the boundary line between different States 
might be only an imaginary line, or a river that could easily 
be forded, there was a necessity of being always prepared for 
an attack, so the army designed for the country's protection 
could be at any time used to quell any opposition on the part 
of the citizens. The Tudors had no army. So they did not 
dare to trespass on the rights of the people ; for they had no 
adequate force at hand to intimidate those who should resist. 
Even Henry YIIL did little to lessen permanently the bold 
and self-reliant spirit which had grown so strong. It is true 
that the reign of Henry YIIL was one of terror. The heads 
of all who displeased him rolled from the block. But strangely 
his policy was of a kind that did not bring any permanent 
injury to the liberties of the country. The policy which he 
adopted had been suggested by Thomas Cromwell, a man 
whose character is one of the inscrutable mysteries of history. 
Little is known of his early life, except that he had been in 
Italy, and it is quite evident that he had profited by the writ- 
ings of MachiaveUi. He conceived a definite aim of carrying 
on the government in such a way as to put all power into the 



35 

hands of Hem-j and make him absolute. But instead of 
openly appearing as the foe of the national liberties, he used 
Parliament as his tool, and made the old forms of constitu- 
tional freedom serve as the instruments of his tyranny. The 
whole nation was panic stricken ; but they did not realize that 
all was part of a plan to enslave them. Every new step was 
taken, every new measure was carried through with such 
adroitness, that the people thought it was the work of their 
own Parliament. They never lost faith in themselves. 

Yet all were not thus blind. Under the very eye of the 
king, Sir Thomas More, one of the most conspicuous friends 
of the " new learning," dared to publish his " Utopia," in 
which he declaimed against the prevalent tyranny. He de- 
scribed an ideal country where flourished public security, 
religious tolerance, equality, brotherhood, freedom. He went 
further. He advocated the principle that a sovereign should 
be removed on the mere suspicion of a design to enslave the 
people. He hints that there was at that very time an attempt 
to do this in England ; that the law courts were lending them- 
selves to the assistance of those who were bent on destroying 
English freedom. He says that the maxim was beginning to 
be avowed that the king can do no wrong ; that there were 
those who claimed that not only the property but the persons 
of all subjects in the realm are the king's, and that a subject 
has a right to no more than the king's goodness thinks fit not 
to take. 

Queen Elizabeth tried to carry on her government according 
to the policy of her father, by managing Parliament, and 
packing it with the nominees of the Crown. But with the 
spread of new religious views, and with the increasing intelli- 
gence of the people, this became every year more and more 
difficult. The nation was learning to rely on itself. A new 
generation of Enghshmen had grown up, who felt that they 
ought to have a share in the control of their own affau'S. 



36 

Cromwell, in carrying out his policy in the reign of her father, 
had found it to be so great an advantage to have it appear 
that Parliament had authorized every arbitrary measure, that 
he had taken pains to obtain its sanction for measures which 
had before been considered as belonging specially to the king's 
prerogative ; such as questions about trade, questions respect- 
ing religion, even matters of state, which never before had 
been submitted to Parliament. Elizabeth's own title to the 
Crown rested on a Parliamentary statute. In conformity with 
what had become a precedent, Parhament continued after the 
death of Henry VIII. to take action respecting such matters. 
They even, when they saw fit, dared to dictate to the Queen 
what her policy should be, Elizabeth was indignant. Mr. 
Green tells us that on one occasion she complained to the 
Spanish ambassador — " They have acted like rebels. They 
have dealt with me as they would not have dealt with my 
father. I cannot tell what these devils want !" The ambassa- 
dor replied : " They want liberty, madam, and if princes do 
not look to themselves, and work together to put such people 
down, they will find before long what all this is coming to." 
But Elizabeth was forced to submit, and she even solemnly 
declared to the Commons that "she did not mean to prejudice 
any part of the liberties heretofore granted them." 

The reign of Queen Elizabeth marks the commencement 
of a new era in English history. During all her long life, the 
aspect of things was changing. England was slowly beginning 
to take a place among the European States as an important 
power. As we now look back to the period before her time, 
it is difiicult for us to realize that the England of the sixteenth 
century was not what England has been since. So many 
people are deceived by the exaggerated estimate which Henry 
YIII. put on his own unportance, and have been led to sup- 
pose that he was really something hke the equal of Charles Y. 
and Francis I. in power and influence. But it should not be 



3T 

forgotten that the chief importance of England at that time 
arose from the fact that the political strength of those two 
great monarchs was so nearly balanced that it was for their 
interest to court the king of even a thu-d-rate nation as 
a make-weight. England was then the make-weight in 
European politics. 

The real position of Henry YIII. may be illustrated by a 
conversation reported in a letter to Francis I. by the French 
ambassador in London, which appears in the last volume of 
the English state papers just published. Henry YIII. was 
talking with him in his usual braggadocio style, declaiming 
about what he intended to do, and what he should require of 
the king, when the ambassador, after having respectfully heard 
him through, quietly responded : " Your Majesty, that means 
war " — and the blustering king was brought to the reahzation 
of his own real weakness, and at once changed his tone. 

The early years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth were one 
long struggle for national existence. England was saved from 
destruction only by the jealousies of her powerful neighbors. 
Even at home, her own people were ever ready to fly at each 
other's thi-oats, and she did not dare to take sides with either 
party. Her real genius displayed itself in her make-shift 
policy. To keep everything as quiet as possible was what she 
aimed at, and to accomplish this she did not hesitate to tell the 
most unblushing falsehoods even to her ministers of state. 
Elizabeth did not like the Puritans, but during all her reign 
she was obliged to trust them, and even to court them. The 
intelligent, the educated, the active men of the country were 
to a great extent of that party. But even if they had not been, 
she did not dare to rely upon then- opponents. Whether she 
liked it or not, she even had to fill the Episcopal Sees, when 
they became vacant, with the men who had been exiled during 
the Marian persecutions, and had learned their theology from 
the Calvinistic reformers on the continent. For political rea- 



38 

sons she was obliged also to help with her armies the Hugue- 
nots in France, and the Hollanders in the Low Countries, and 
the men who served in those campaigns came back with the 
love of liberty and religion intensified. They had witnessed 
the atrocities for which PhiHp II. was responsible ; they had 
admired the heroic efforts of the Netherlanders to shake off the 
Spanish yoke ; they had seen the sacrifices that the country- 
men of William the Silent were willing to make to achieve 
their political and religious independence ; they had learned to 
disregard the fulminations of the once dreaded pope ; they had 
faced the best soldiers of Spain and Italy on many a hard- 
fought field and had seen them, time and again, skip like lambs 
before their victorious arms. Mr. Markham, in his Life of Sir 
Francis and Sir Horace Yere, says that at the close of the reign 
of Elizabeth, " there was scarcely a man in England who had 
not either himself served in the Low Countries, or had not a 
relative or neighbor who had." On the return of these men 
to England, they spread in every direction the new ideas re- 
specting religion and liberty which they had learned. 

Those campaigns in the Netherlands are of special interest 
to us as Americans. It is true that all the history of England 
which we have been reviewing is of interest as a part of our 
own history. When we go back to those centuries, we are on 
our own ground. Through all those centuries, oui- ancestors 
stood shoulder to shoulder with the ancestors of the men who 
to-day call themselves Englishmen. All of this history is as 
full of personal interest to us as it is to any of them. It is not 
one whit more theirs than it is ours. But we have reached now 
a period when we can single out individuals and trace the in- 
fluences which prepared them for their work in this country. 
Those campaigns in the Netherlands not only educated the 
men who were to figure in the coming Revolution in England, 
but also the men to whom our New England ancestors looked 
for leadership in their military enterprises. I turn in the Bio- 



39 

graphical Dictionary to the name of our earliest Connecticut 
soldier, the hero of the Peqiiot war, and read : " John Mason, 
trained to arms in the Netherlands, under Sir Thomas Fair- 
fax." I read also : " Miles Standish, trained under Sir 
Horace Vere, and served in the army of the Netherlands ;" and 
so Lion Gardiner, and Winslow, and others. The soldiers 
who went to the Netherlands were either Puritans or men who 
were sure to become Puritans after their first campaign. 

The closing years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth were 
crowned with success. She had triumphed over all her ene- 
mies at home and abroad. The Spaniard was no longer feared. 
England had become an important power among the nations of 
Europe. "Wealth and intelligence had multiplied among the 
people. Mr. Green tells us that one London merchant, Thomas 
Sutton, at his own expense founded the great hospital and 
school of the Charter Llouse ; another, Hugh Myddleton, 
brought the New Kiver from its springs at Chadwell and Am- 
well to supply London with pure water. A new architecture, 
too, began to testify that even the tastes of the people were 
improving, and their ideas of comfort. The vast and beautiful 
cathedrals in England and on the continent that travelers so 
much admire, the picturesque medieval castles, which had ex- 
isted for centuries before the reign of Elizabeth, had been no 
index of what was the social life of the peoj^le. The cathe- 
drals had been built when art was religion. The church in 
those days was what a hundred other buildings combine to 
make up at the present time. The church was the town hall, 
the concert room, the theatre, the school, the newsroom, the 
vestry, all in one. The reason that those vast cathedrals had 
been built was that, at a time when most people lived in hov- 
els, the church afforded a place of meeting for the whole neigh- 
boring population. Each cathedral was the poor man's palace 
as well as that of the prince, the poor man's castle as well as 
that of the noble, where no enemy could reach him to do him 



40 

harm. The castles of the nobles were only fortresses, and the 
dwelling rooms in them were utterly cheerless. But now, as the 
result of the growing wealth, buildings of a different character 
began to be erected, and that Elizabethan architecture arose 
which many persons suppose to have been only one of various 
styles which then everywhere met the eye. Instead of this, 
the Elizabethan houses were only the iirst attempt at anything 
ornate or convenient. 



Now this was the period in which the men who settled New 
Haven were born. These were the influences which sur- 
rounded theii" childhood. I have only attempted to give the 
broadest outline of some of the more important forces which 
had made the nation what it then was. I offer no apology for 
not attempting anything in the way of detail. The time at 
my command does not admit of it. The details have been 
rehearsed in your hearing a hundred times. I have thought 
that some such comprehensive sketch as I have attempted 
might present something more of novelty. I have wished only 
to call your attention to the fact that as far back in history as 
we can go — nearly two thousand years — it had been the race 
characteristic of the English people to be predisposed to be 
religious, and to cherish the love of freedom. It had been 
even a passion with them to take care of their own affairs. 
They had ever been a practical, a sensible, a level-headed peo- 
ple. These race characteristics had survived all the attempts 
of the Tudor kings to curb and destroy them, so that at the 
death of Queen Elizabeth they were actually stronger than 
ever before. The influences which had followed in the train 
of tlie " new learning," and above all the publication of the 
Bible, had educated a class of men who were determined to 
think for themselves, and who were pervaded with an intense 
feeling of individual responsibility to God for all that they did. 



41 

Speaking of these men, Mr. Taine says, that " disdaining all 
the equivocations of worldly morality, they had enthroned 
conscientious labor in the workshop, probity in the counting 
house, truth in the tribunal, purity in the domestic hearth. 
They were attentive to the least requirements of duty. With 
fixed determination and with inexhaustible patience, courage, 
sacrifice, they were ready to bear all, and do all, rather than 
fail in the least injunction of moral justice and Bible law." 

From this moment, the future of the English people was 
assured. Not in vain had been the sobriety and seriousness 
which had marked the race from the first ; — not in vain that 
disposition to inquire about the " obscure beyond " that readi- 
ness to respond loyally to every appeal to duty ; — not in vain 
that remarkable aptitude for self-government. The soil had 
been long preparing for the seed, and now that it had been 
sowed, there could be no question what would be the harvest. 
[^ The Bible was hailed as giving an explanation of all the 
dark enigmas that had perplexed so many generations. Men 
no longer rested satisfied with a mere outward connection with 
the church. They no longer resigned all the great issues of 
life and death to a priesthood. Each man realized that he sus- 
tained a personal relation to God, as truly as if he were alone 
in the universe with his Creator. He saw now what was the 
meaning of life. The here and the hereafter were parts of the 
same existence. He was placed in this world to develop his 
own individual character and fit himself for the service of God 
hereafter. The Bible prescribed the rule of conduct which he 
was to follow. The kingdom of God had been set up on earth 
and he was to be, in every relation of life, loyal to its interests, 
and thus prepare himself for the service of God in heaven. 
This was Puritanism ; and to-day, among English speaking 
people, this is everywhere accepted as essential to a true reli- 
gious life, among those who are not distinctively Puritan, as 
truly as among those who acknowledge their Puritan descent. 



42 

Even in the Roman Catholic church, it is now everywhere pro- 
claimed in all Protestant countries, that the mere formal con- 
nection with that particular church, and external conformity to 
its prescribed ritual, is useless. 



Now it was when such a state of things had come to exist in 
England, that a king succeeded to the throne, in accordance 
with the theory of dynastic rule, who was of a different race. 
It is true that his grandfather's grandfatlier had been an 
English king, and so it may be said that one-sixteenth part 
of him w^as of English extraction ; but he had nothing in 
common with the people over whom he came to rule. He 
did not understand them, and he remained through life a 
stranger to all their thoughts and traditions. He belonged to 
a family which for a hundred years had been engaged in a 
fierce struggle to maintain their position against warring fac- 
tions of nobles. He himself had suffered humihations which 
had embittered all his feehngs, and made him the suspicious 
and determined enemy of all that might in any way oppose 
his will. He came to England with the settled determination 
to stem the current of national feeling which had been for 
so many centuries steadily setting towards a more enlarged 
freedom. I do not propose to characterize James I. Every 
new historian who writes about him has sought to tax all the 
resources of the English language to express contempt of his 
ridiculous self-conceit, his unbounded pride, his want of tact, 
his pedantry, and his hundred weaknesses. Believing that he 
had a divine right to rule, he soon avowed that there were no 
limits to the royal prerogative. At a time when religion waa 
a subject in which every one felt a most absorbing interest, 
and w^ien intelligence was so widely diffused that the people 
understood what were the interests of the nation, and felt that 
they had a right through their representatives in Parhament 



43 

to have a share in the conduct of affairs, James attempted to 
exercise a more exckisive control over all that pertained to 
church and state, than any king who had gone before him. 
He openly expressed contempt for the public policy of Queen 
Elizabeth, and the nation heard with amazement that he was 
making peace proposals to the Spaniards, that he was nego- 
tiating with the pope, and that he was denouncing the Hol- 
landers as rebels. As his lofty ideas of absolute power began 
to be developed more fully, he ran counter to the prejudices 
of all classes in the realm. The Eoman Catholics were so 
enraged that they formed the gunpowder plot. The Puritans 
were insulted and browbeaten. He threatened that they 
should be " harried out of the land." The nobles were exas- 
perated by the sale of new peerages and even high offices 
of state. Parliaments were prorogued. The judges were 
reduced to be the servants of his will ; the course of justice 
was tampered with ; new offences were created by proclama- 
tion ; new penalties, without the act of Parliament ; offenders 
were brought before courts that had no legal jurisdiction. 
Yet when did an unscrupulous king ever find lack of courtiers 
to give him help and encouragement ? Soon they proclaimed 
the principle that was afterwards reduced to a system by Sir 
Robert Filmer, that " the subject has no positive rights in 
behalf of which he may decline illegal requisitions." That he 
is " bound to obey the king's command against law, nay, in 
some cases, against divine laws." Preachers were rewarded, 
and advanced in position, for teaching that " the king might 
take the subject's money at his pleasure, and no one might 
refuse his demand on penalty of damnation." The university 
of Oxford pronounced a solemn decree that it is " in no case 
lawful for subjects to make use of force against their princes," 
and all persons promoted to degrees were compelled to sub- 
scribe this article. A little later this same university anathe- 
mized as "false, seditious, and impious," the doctrine that 



44 

civil authority is derived from the people. It was declared 
that there could be no release from this thraldom. The sub- 
ject could not divest himself of the allegiance which he owed 
to the Lord's anointed. As long as lie had life, he was 
amenable, whej-ever he might go, to the despotic power of the 
Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission. 

Contemporaneous with the innovations, almost countless in 
number, which were going on in the government of the 
church and the state, pubHc attention was called to a series 
of scandals connected with the raising of the so-called " Favor- 
ites" to the highest offices of the government, which even now 
cannot be read without amazement and disgust. There was 
the divorce of Essex, and the mai'riage of his worthless wife, 
Catherine Howard, to the equally worthless Scotch page, Carr, 
who was elevated to the peerage as Yiscount Rochester. There 
was the murder of Sir John Overbury ; and, with the fall of 
Somerset, the raising of the shallow and unjDrincipled Yilliers 
to the head of affairs, as Duke of Buckingham. The Court 
was thoroughly corrupt, and it became publicly known that 
great nobles had been playing the part of panders ; that high 
officers of state had been in league with cheats, and astrologers, 
and poisoners. The corruption which was so conspicuous in 
the Court was spreading also among all classes of the people. 
The young men of wealth who were sent to travel on the 
continent that they might learn what was called the " Italian 
pohsh," came back in too many instances mere fops and 
profligates, caring for nothing in heaven or earth save personal 
enjoyment, Italy was then the center from whence spread to 
all nations who had any connection with her, every form of 
crime and wickedness. Sins were practiced there worthy of 
the doom of the Cities of the Plain. But in Italy vice was 
veiled, and some show of decency was preserved. Vice was 
deprived of its grossness and made attractive. But when the 
vices of the polished races around the Mediterranean were 



45 

copied by the coarser people of England, there was an exhibi- 
tion of low sensuality which was absolutely disgusting and 
almost beyond belief. Even the few details, which the histo- 
rians of the period give as illustrations of what they assure 
their readers are the least objectionable examples of it, are 
simply sickening. The whole reign of James was a reign of 
shame. There was nothing to redeem it. His foreign policy 
was no better than his home policy. It was so weak and 
vacillating that the nation was humiliated and exasperated ; 
and England, which, at the death of Queen Elizabeth, had 
rank among the great powers of Europe, was disgraced, and 
was regarded as a mere satellite of Spain. 



This exhibition of the state of things in England during 
the reign of James I. — inadequate as the limits of this Address 
have necessitated it to be — will serve at least to show what 
were some of the influences which moulded the characters of 
the founders of New Haven and of New England during their 
early manhood. Those men were probably for the most part 
the children of the original proprietors of the soil in England, 
whose pedigree went back of the Norman intruders. They 
belonged to the great party which was still true to the Anglo- 
Saxon traditions of liberty, and which felt it to be a sacred 
duty to uphold the national honor, at home and abroad. With 
all sincerity, and with all the seriousness and practical spirit 
of their race, they had accepted the Bible as a revelation of 
God, given by Him to regulate their daily life. They were 
thoroughly in earnest — if ever men were in this world — in 
their endeavor to conform to what they thought to be the veri- 
table commandments of God. The innovations which were 
being made in the government of the State as well as that of 
the Church caused dismay among them. The increasing cor- 
ruption of morals which had become absolutely disgusting, and 



46 

of wliicli most persons at the present day have not the slightest 
conception, affected them with the deepest alarm. Yice was 
flaunting itself openly. Virtue, purity, religion were boldly 
ridiculed. Some new public or private scandal was almost 
every day exposed. The Puritans strove valiantly in the con- 
test which was then going on. It was a many-sided contest, 
waged against absolutism and against vice. There was a dis- 
play of heroism on their part that is now fully recognized by 
all the great historians of the period. Carlyle, Goldwin Smith, 
Charles Kingsley, Green, and so many others, have exposed the 
foolish and malicious libels with which those who have been in 
sympathy with the court party have striven in every succeed- 
ing age to make the Puritans seem hateful, and the most elo- 
quent pages of these writers have been those in which they 
have sought to do honor to the magnanimity and the true man- 
liness of the Puritan character. But, at the time, all that could 
be done by the Puritans to preserve the liberties of England 
seemed unavailing. Their leaders in parliament and in the 
church were fined and imprisoned, and forced to flee for their 
lives to the continent. Hope itself was almost dead. 

It may assist us in the attempt to understand the condition 
of things in England at that time if we recall what was the 
state of feeling in the I^orthern States during the years pre- 
ceding our civil war. Public sentiment here was almost unani- 
mous as to the evils of slavery ; but the slave power was so 
intrenched in the constitution of the United States that all 
effort to put limits to its increase seemed futile. It was always 
and everywhere aggressive. The Missouri Compromise had 
been followed by nullification in South Carolina, by the an- 
nexation of Texas, by war with Mexico, by the fugitive slave 
law, by the Nebraska bill, by the outrages in Kansas, by the 
Dred Scott decision, by legislation in favor of slavery. The 
claim was made at last that slave ownership should be pro- 
tected throughout the whole national domain. Our whole 



47 

political life was affected by it. Too many of our ablest states- 
men were so overawed by the slave interest that tliey feared 
to offer any resistance. Those who endeavored to stand up 
against it were ridiculed. Even the conscience of the nation 
seemed to be growing indifferent. The friends of liberty 
looked around with doubt and dismay. But it was vastly worse 
in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. 

After James came Charles I, and the ascendancy of Buck- 
ingham, the arrest and imprisonment and death of Sir John 
Eliot, the dissolution of parliament, the announcement of the 
king that he would rule without a parliament, the forbidding 
any one to even speak of a parliament ever being held again, 
the despotism of the Privy Council, the Star Chamber, and 
the Court of High Commission, government by proclamation, 
forced loans, monopolies, feudal and forest extortions, ship 
money, the tenure of the judges made to depend on the king's 
pleasure, the Protestant cause on the continent openly aban- 
doned, Tilly and Wallenstein carrying all before them in 
Germany. 

What wonder that many of the Puritans began to question 
whether it was not better to leave England and lind a new 
home beyond the ocean. At last a little band of colonists 
established themselves at Plymouth. Another and much more 
important colony was begun at Boston, and then a company of 
London merchants, with the Pev. John Davenport as their 
leader, conceived the idea of a new colony, of which this city 
to-day is the outgrowth. 



It does not fall within the scope of this Address to give any 
account of the New Haven colony, or of the remarkable man 
who was its leader ; yet I ask your indulgence — which I fear 
has already been too heavily taxed — while, very briefly, I 
remind you that John Davenport had conceived a plan of gov- 



48 

ernment far in advance of anything that had been attempted 
before ; and in his attempts to carry out his conception, and 
protect the colony from all hostile interference from the gov- 
ernment of the country which they had abandoned, he showed 
qualities of statesmanship for which he is to be ranked among 
the ablest men of his day. It has been claimed that the con- 
stitution which was framed in the cabin of the Mayflower 
marked a new epoch ; but the men of Plymouth were not en- 
tirely disentangled from the old traditions. They acknowl- 
edged themselves to be still under English rule. They did not 
even desire to shake it off. They subscribed themselves " the 
loyal subjects of our dread sovereign King James ;" and what 
they did they declared was done for the " honor of our King 
and country." The colonists who settled Massachusetts not 
only made no progress in theory upon the colony of Plymouth, 
but they did not go as far. They went out from England 
under Enghsh charters. Their claim to the rights which they 
asserted was founded, in their estimation, on the fact that they 
were free-born Englishmen. And it is questionable whether 
in England to this day civil rights are supposed to rest on any- 
thing more venerable or more sacred than the provisions of 
Magna Charta and the Common Law. The colonists, also, who 
settled the river towns on the Connecticut did not forget that 
they, too, were Englishmen. For months they supposed that 
they were within the patent of the old Massachusetts colony, 
and acted accordingly. K^ot so John Davenport and Governor 
Eaton. They formed their colony in London for the express 
purpose of carrying out new and pecuhar views respecting 
human rights and civil government. They claimed that there 
were rights which were theirs, not because they were English- 
men, but because they were men. They fell back on the natu- 
ral and inherent rights which belonged to them by virtue of 
their manhood. They had shaped their views into a well- 
digested plan. They were of the opinion that if they went 



49 

beyond the limits of any existing English government, they 
were free to expatriate themselves. And when they reached 
Boston, on their way to a new home, though they were invited 
and urged to remain there, they refused, and would not be 
di'awn aside from their purpose by the great inducements 
which were offered. It was their plan to establish a State by 
mutual agreement, on Christian principles, beyond the reach 
of English authority, and without any reference of any kind 
whatever, express or implied, to the government of the king or 
to any of the institutions of their native land. Here was the 
first example of such a government on the American continent. 



While speaking so briefly of this remarkable plan of theirs, 
so well considered, so much more far reaching than anything 
conceived of by either of the other colonies, I do not know 
that it will consist with the seriousness and dignity of the 
subject, or of the present occasion, to allude to the fact that 
it has been reserved for the present generation to advance a 
theory that the colonists who founded New Haven did not 
come here with any such high purpose, but came here only to 
trade. It is true that as sensible and practical men, knowing 
that a colony which is to be prosperous and enduring must 
have some means of support, and having been engaged in 
commerce at home, they naturally intended to go on with the 
occupation for which their previous pursuits had fitted them. 
What else could they do ? They were not tillers of the soil. 
It could hardly be expected that such men would be satisfied 
to go so far without some plan for supporting themselves. 
There is no question that they planned to trade and build up 
here a commercial city. It would have been strange if they 
had not thought of some way to provide for their famihes 
and themselves. But if it is meant that those London mer- 
chants came here j>rincipally for purposes of gain, no state- 
4 



50 

ment could be more preposterous. I hardly need to repeat 
that it was a time when the Anglo-Saxon love of freedom 
which had been growing stronger and deeper for two thousand 
years, had at last clashed with absolutism. The struggle 
which had begun was one to the death. All England was at 
a white heat on the subject of religion and free government. 
John Davenport was one of the marked men among the 
political and religious leaders of the time. During his exile 
in Holland, he had given much thought to the subject of 
" civil government," and he had elaborated original views 
with regard to it, which he afterwards published. To suppose 
that such a man as he, or Governor Eaton, came here in the 
early part of the reign of Charles I. to " make money," is under 
the circumstances even more absurd than to suppose that the 
honored champion of freedom,* whose voice rang out from 
this pulpit so boldly for fifty years against American slavery, 
could have left 'New Haven just when the excitement preced- 
ing the Civil War was greatest, and gone to some one of the 
Aleutian Islands to make money by engaging in the seal 
fishery, and had carried with him the ablest of the men who 
had been accustomed to gather in this church from week to 
week, to listen to his preaching. The men who founded New 
Haven came here when Cromwell liimself was debating the 
question whether it was not the wisest thing for the cause of 
English liberty to cross the ocean and build up a new " Eng- 
land." Among the Xew Haven men were some of his own 
kinsmen ; and when the Protector had succeeded to power, he 
wrote to his old friends in this town, and invited them to 
return. Some of them did return. Letters were also sent to 
John Davenport, to Thomas Hooker of Hartford, and John 
Cotton of Boston, the three great leaders of the time in New 
England, "earnestly inviting them to return to their native 
country for a season, in order to assist in conducting to a happy 
* Rev. Leonard Bacon, D.D. 



51 

issue the great Revolution then in progress tliere." Do I need 
to say more than that this theory about John Davenport is too 
absurd for any serious answer ? 



Two hundred and lifty years have passed since that com- 
pany of English Christians landed on these shores, and to-day 
we ask ourselves what has been the success of their enterprise. 
We know that after years of labor and discouragement, it 
seemed to them that they had failed. Their colony had been 
the wealthiest of all the colonies that had come to America. 
It seemed to have the fairest hopes of success. But disaster 
after disaster had befallen it. Yet as we look back to-day, we 
can see that they did succeed, and that their success has been 
greater than even their highest expectations. They hoped to 
build up a commercial city, and here is a city, which is, at 
least, half as large as what was known distinctively as the 
" City of London " at the time they left it. They wished to 
build up a State independent of English control, and the city 
they founded is a part of a sovereign State, which is one of 
the great powers of the world, with a much larger population 
than that of all the English islands combined. And certainly 
no city in the land did more to prepare the way for American 
independence, or give shape to the present government of 
the United States. Their leading idea was that the two great 
bulwarks of a State should be religion and universal education. 
This idea of theirs has also triumphed everywdiere throughout 
the whole nation. An integral part of their plan was that the 
city they founded should be the seat of a university. The im- 
portance that John Davenport attached to this part of his plan, 
as it has always seemed to me, was owing in great measure to 
what he had seen in Ley den. Dm-ing his residence there, he 
was a witness of the estimation in which its citizens held the 
famous university which had been granted to them by William 



52 

of Orange " with advice of the Estates," as " a reward for their 
suiferings, and as " a manifestation of the gratitude entertained 
by the people of Holland and Zealand for their heroic defence 
of their city " against the Spaniards. It should not be for- 
gotten, too, that John Davenport had the satisfaction before 
he died of believing that he had succeeded in this, and that 
he had laid the foundation of a college. Almost his last 
official act here was to draw up a paper in which he spoke of 
the college as '' founded and begun." And although that in- 
stitution never actually rose above the rank of a Gi'ammar 
School, yet it is due to the memory of that remarkable man 
that his hopeful words should be remembered. He certainly 
was the pioneer who prepared the way for the University, 
whose influence has been felt throughout the world, of which 
his son-in-law, James Pierpont, who became his successor and 
the heir of his plans and hopes, was, not long after, the founder. 



The estimate which I have now given of the Puritan charac- 
ter, I doubt not, is in the main in accordance with that of those 
of you who have thus far listened to me. Yet it is sometimes 
said, even by the admirers of the heroism of the Puritans, and 
of their loyalty to the cause of liberty and to the interests of 
religion, and who feel deeply the indebtedness to them of all 
the subsequent generations of English-speaking men and wo- 
men, that after all they were not people whom one would like 
to live with ! If there should be any one present who has ever 
entertained a feeling of this kind, I would ask him who there 
is among the very best men of former ages who have really 
done anything for their own generation, or for mankind, who 
would be an agreeable inmate of his home, under the changed 
conditions of life in the nineteenth century. 

Is it not true that the generations as they succeed each other 
are each moulded by the experiences through which they have 



53 

liad to pass ? One generation can no more enter into the feel- 
ings and habits of the generations which have preceded, or con- 
form to them, than a child can enter into the feelings of its 
parents and live its parents' life with any satisfaction. In ad- 
dition, it is to be remembered that the men who have ever 
done anything of value for their generation or for the race 
have been forced to endure sacrifices and hardships, and in the 
terrible ordeal tlu'ough which they have had to pass have neces- 
sarily acquired a fixedness of purpose, a sternness of manner, 
and an absorption of spirit, which accord ill with the ideas and 
habits of those whose lot has been cast in happier times. I do 
not think that Luther, or Augustine, or Chrysostom — I do not 
think that even any one of the evangelists or apostles them- 
selves, with the habits of an oriental who lived two thousand 
years ago, — would be found to accommodate himself to our 
modes of life in such a way that we should find him to be a 
pleasant person to have in our houses. Or to take men of a 
diiferent class, I do not think that there is any one, no matter 
how much he cares for rank or display, who could endure to 
have Charles II., or Louis XIV., or Lord Chesterfield, or Beau 
Brummell, or any man of fashion of any preceding age, as the 
constant companion of his days. 

But I wiU not go so far back in history or to other lands. I 
wiU remind you of that one of our own countrymen to whom 
the heart of every American turns with greatest reverence and 
pride. No man of his time on this continent had greater ad- 
vantages in his childhood and youth than Washington. He 
was carefully trained in literature, in manners, and in every 
manly accomplishment by a relative of his family, who had 
been a personal friend of Addison and a contributor to the 
Spectator, who had held a high social position in England as 
an English nobleman, who was in addition a Christian gentle- 
man. At the beginning of the Revolution, when he was ap- 
pointed general in chief of the American army, he was sup- 



54 

posed to be the richest man in America, and had always lived 
in a style which few could imitate. Bnt eight years of the 
stem experiences of war made a change in the whole bearing 
of the handsome young officer who only a few years before had 
visited New England for the first time on horseback with a 
company of gay young friends, and the men of his own time 
who revered him — some of whom perhaps would have died for 
him — found him so reticent, so dignified, so stern, so absorbed, 
that all who approached him felt under restraint. 

It must be so necessarily. Those who fight the great battles 
of life come out scarred, and wearied, and worn. Of one of 
the most accomplished men of our own time, who labored for 
the freedom of Italy, we read that after the failure of a certain 
enterprise which cost the lives of some of his dearest friends, 
he was never seen to smile. Of how many others do we read 
that even after success had crowned their labors, they them- 
selves lived ever after under the shadow of some great grief. 
But who of the generations who will reap the fruits of their 
efforts will ask if they were pleasant people to live with ? 

I believe that the Puritans were naturally as genial as any 
class of Englishmen or Americans to-day. There were sour 
men among them, I doubt not, as there were among the party 
whom they opposed. Who could be more sour than Arch- 
bishop Laud ? If you have any doubts, look at his portrait ! 
Charles Kingsley says of one of his heroes : Did his being a 
Puritan "prevent his being six feet high? Were his 
shoulders the less broad for it, his cheek the less ruddy for 
it ? He wore his flaxen hair of the same length that every 
one now wears theirs, instead of letting it hang half-way to 
his waist in essenced curls ; but was he therefore the less of 
a viking's son, bold hearted as his sea-roving ancestors, who 
won the Danelagh by Canute's side? .... He carried a 
Bible in his jack-boots ; but did that prevent him, as Oliver 
rode past him with an approving smile on Naseby field, think- 



55 

ing himself a very handsome fellow, with his moustache and 
imperial, and bright red coat, and cuirass well polished, in 
spite of many a dint, as he sate his father's great black horse 
as gracefully and firmly as any long-locked and essenced cava- 
lier in front of him? .... No poetry in him as the long 
rapier swung round his head five minutes later, redder and 
redder at every sweep ? We are befooled by names ! Call 
him Crusader instead of Roundhead, and he seems at once 
(granting him only sincerity, which he had, and that of a riglit 
awful kind) as complete a knight-errant as ever watched and 
prayed, ere putting on liis spurs, in fantastic Gothic chapel, 
' beneath storied windows richly dight.' .... No poetry in 
those old Puritans ? Why not ? They were men of like pas- 
sions with ourselves. They loved, they married, they brought 
up children ; they feared, they sinned, they sorrowed, they 
fought — they conquered ! There was poetry enough in them, 
be sure — though they acted it like men instead of singing it 
like birds." 

There was a time when it might possibly have been worth 
while to make some reference to the attempts of the enemies 
of the Puritans to excite prejudice against them by represent- 
ing them as gloomy ascetics. It was gravely charged against 
them that they would not eat mince pies or plumb puddings 
on Christmas day ! But the reply was that they ate them on 
other days ; and every one knows now that the reason they 
did not eat them publicly at Christmas was, that to do so had, 
in the popular mind, a political significance. Just as in this 
country, not very long ago, many very cheerful people avoided 
wearing a white hat for fear that it might be supposed that 
they were publicly displaying their political sympathies for 
the presidential aspirations of Mr. Horace Greeley. It is not 
very long ago too, that, in some other parts of the United 
States, loyal men were unwilling to wear gray trowsers or 
butternut coats. Does any one believe that these people had 



56 

any reKgious objections to a white or a butternut color, or that 
they supposed that their Maker would be better pleased with 
them if they di-essed themselves all over in regulation blue ? 
Lord Macaulay once gave utterance to an ungenerous fling at 
the Puritans. He said that they opposed bear-baiting, not 
because they cared for the pain suffered by the bear, but be- 
cause they begrudged the spectators the pleasure of the sport. 
He was answered speedily, that he had spoken more truly 
than he thought. The Puritans were opposed to bear-baiting 
because they knew that a people who could take pleasure in 
witnessing the torture to which a dumb animal was exposed, 
were a people who could not be trusted to maintain English 
liberty. But it is idle to treat seriously the misrepresentations 
and the abuse of this kind which has been heaped upon the 
Puritans. 

Undoul)tedly the men who were fined and imprisoned, the 
men who were forced to leave their native land and make a 
new home in the wilderness, did not escape some of the marks 
of the hard experiences through which they were obliged to 
pass. They bore honorable scars received in the battle they 
waged. It may be worth while then to see what description of 
men the founders of New Haven really were. Of Theophilus 
Eaton, the first Puritan Governor, Dr. Bacon said, as the 
result of his study of the public record of his services : "I 
have acquired new views of the dignity which belongs to the 
place of the civil magistrate." Hubbard, the historian of 
Massachusetts, who was one of his contemporaries, says : " This 
man had in him great gifts, and as many excellences as are 
usually found in any one man. He had an excellent princely 
face and ]3ort, commanding respect from all others. He was a 
good scliolar, a traveler, a great reader ; of an exceeding steady 
and even spirit, not easily moved to passion, and standing un- 
shaken in his principles when once fixed upon ; of a profound 
judgment, full of majesty and authority in his judicatures, so 



5T 

that it was a vain thing to offer to brave him out ; and yet in 
his ordinary conversation, and among friends, of such pleasant- 
ness of behavior and such felicity and fecundity of harmless 
wit as can hardly be paralleled." Mather declares of him that 
"for a score of years he was the glory and pillar of ISTew 
Haven colony," He says of him : " He carried in his very 
countenance a majesty which camiot be described ; and in his 
dispensations of justice, he was a mirror for the most imitable 
impartiality but ungainsayable authority of his proceedings,' 
being awfully sensible of the obligations which the oath of a 
judge lays upon him. Hence he who would most patiently 
bear hard things offered to his person in private cases, would 
never pass by any public affronts or neglects, when he appeared 
mider the character of a magistrate. But he still was the guide 
of the blind, the staff of the lame, the helper of the widow and 
orphan, and all the distressed. None that had a good cause 
was afraid of coming before him." The same writer de- 
scribes him also as he appeared at home : "As in his govern- 
ment of the commonwealth, so in the government of his 
family, he was prudent, serious, hap23y to a wonder; and 
albeit he sometimes had a large family, consisting of no less 
than thirty persons, yet he managed them with such an even 
temper, that observers have affirmed they never saw a house 
ordered with more wisdom." " He kept an honorable and 
hospitable table." " He countenanced the addresses unto him- 
seK of the children and servants with any of their inquiries." 
And we find still another witness in one who had been a ser- 
vant in his family, whose beautiful testimony reminds us of 
what that ablest of all modern English critics, so gifted with 
the power of insight — Samuel Taylor Coleridge — said respect- 
ing the character of Falconbridge, in " King John," and the 
inferences he drew respecting his courtesy and chivalrous 
spirit, from the affectionate language of the reply addressed to 



58 

liim by his old servant, "James Gurney." Falconbridge re- 
quests him to withdraw, saying, 

"James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?" 

And the answer is, 

" Good leave, good Philip." 

To which Falconbridge replies, 

"James, 
There's toys abroad. Anon I'll tell thee more." 

This other JSTew Haven servant could say, many years after his 
master's death : " Whatever difficulty in my daily walk I now 
meet withal, still something that I either saw or heard in my 
blessed master Eaton's conversation, helped me through it all." 



But it is not now a question of living with Theophilus 
Eaton, or with the founders of New Haven, or even with any 
of the Puritans, but what did those men do in their day and 
generation ; and what did they accomplish ? It is enough to 
say that when a dynasty which can hardly be called Enghsh, 
put forth claims to a right to dispose absolutely of the persons 
and property of our ancestors, they set themselves in opposi- 
tion, and, whether we should like to live with them or not, 
they saved the liberties of England, and have moulded the 
character of all the generations w^iich have followed — in Eng- 
land as well as in America — to a far greater extent than is 
generally supposed. 

There are crises in the history of all nations when the 
old race characteristics are either intensified or greatly modi- 
fied. You are aware that among the theories which have 
been proposed by those who have advocated the doctrine 
of evolution, one of the most ingenious is that at certain 
intervals during the countless aeons of the world's early his- 



59 

tory, there has been, for some reason, a sudden and aston- 
ishing development in living organisms, '■'■ jper saltum'''' as it 
has been called, or by a leap. The theory is that ages have 
passed in which the different species have remained substan- 
tially the same, till they have come at last perhaps nnder the 
influence of some new force, when a change has been made 
^^per saltum^'' or at once, the effect of which has been per- 
ceptible ever after in their organization. Whatever may be 
true in the domain of natural science, it is certainly true in 
human life, and in the history of nations. I need go no 
further than to our Civil War for an illustration, though it is 
on a comparatively very limited scale. The terrible experi- 
ences of those four years produced an effect on the spirit of 
the whole American people which will be felt in their political 
action for centuries. The same thing is true, on a still smaller 
scale, in the life of every individual man. This is too obvious 
to need illustration. 

Now the Puritan age was one of those crises in the liistory 
of the English people, when, as the historians tell us, a definite 
change was made in the English character. But the Puritans 
who came to this country, in addition to all the experiences 
through which they passed in England, endured such hard- 
ships here, made such sacrifices, and struggled with such new 
conditions of life, that among the people of this branch of the 
Anglo-Saxon family many very marked modifications were 
brought about in our characteristics as a people. There are 
more of these than I have time to speak of on the present 
occasion. I shall be obliged to pass by several that I consider 
of even more importance than those I mention. I will con- 
fine myself to a very few. 



It seems to me that that age was so peculiarly an age of un- 
selfish work for the good of others, and particularly for the 



60 

good of the succeedino; ages, that its effects are to be seen in 
every descendant of the Puritans, whether he maintains the 
Puritan faith or not. I am not speaking of the underlying 
race characteristic of loyalty to duty. Ko Anglo-Saxon is 
without that feeling. When Nelson hung out his signal at 
Trafalgar : " England expects every man to do his duty," he 
knew that the heart of every cabin boy in the fleet would re- 
spond and that he would be roused to do his best. No Anglo- 
Saxon, however far he may have wandered from the right, but 
will at least try to convince himseK that he is still loyal to 
duty, in order that he may maintain his own seK-respect. I do 
not refer therefore to this characteristic, or even to that other 
characteristic of working for the mere sake of satisfying the 
desire to be employed about something. 

Some years ago I accompanied a gentleman who belonged 
to one of the Latin races, to the library of the Yale Theologi- 
cal School. On entering, my companion went at once and 
stood before a painting that hangs on the walls which repre- 
sents two children, descendants, I may be excused for saying, 
of one of the original founders of this town. After looking 
at the picture for some time, he said : " By no possibility could 
any one suppose that those children were of any Latin race." 
I asked him his reason. After a moment's reflection, he 
said : " the Latins are always looking within themselves and 
thinking how they appear to other people. The Anglo- 
Saxons, forgetful of themselves, look out on the world to see 
what they can do in it." / That this is measurably true has just 
been recognized in an interesting way by Father Hecker, one 
of the most accomplished of the Paulist Fathers in JMew York. 
In a book, published within the present year, he undertakes to 
give a philosophical explanation of the fact that the Protestant 
nations have exerted more influence in the world than the 
Roman Catholic nations. I quote from his book with no idea 
of controversy, but in the same liberal spirit in which he 



61 

writes. The question is simply one of fact. Father Hecker 
declares that the race characteristic of the Latins is a dispo- 
sition to submit to authority, and he savs the Roman Catho- 
lic chui'ch has made the mistake of devoting its eifort to 
strengthening this race characteristic which was abeady suf- 
ficiently strong, and has tried to resist rather than develop 
among the Latins independent action. It has sought to en- 
courage the passive virtues, rather than the active. On the 
other hand, he says, the race characteristic of the Teutonic 
nations is personal independence, and an eagerness for action, 
and Protestantism has developed still further this race char- 
acteristic, already so strong, and has directed it especially 
against the authority of the church. Here, he says, is the ex- 
planation of the fact that " fifty millions of Protestants " have 
so long exerted and still exert a more controlling influence 
over the movements and destinies of nations than " two hun- 
dred millions of Catholics." 

Now this predisposition among all Teutonic races to be on 
the lookout for something to do, and something to work for, 
has been modified in this country among the descendants of 
the Puritans by the experiences through which their ancestors 
passed. It has been expanded and diverted from mere selfish 
ends, and directed towards the good of others, and especially 
the good of succeeding generations. The aim which the Puri- 
tan proposed to himself as a practical object of life has been 
expressed by the poet in the " Golden Legend." " Let aU 
men's good be each man's rule." No descendant of the Puri- 
tans, of any religious denomination, or even though he be 
without Christian faith, but feels it to be a natural instinct, in 
imitation of the example of his ancestors, to labor in some way 
for the public good, and especially for those who are to come 
after him. It is the very nature of the descendants of the 
Puritans to be pubhc spirited and to plan for the generations 
that are yet unborn. 



TVe owe also to the Puritans the estimate wliieh is placed in 
this eomitrv on manhood. The Anglo-Saxons were always 
characterized by high ideas of personal independence. But a 
new conception was joined with those ideas for the first time 
by the men who took the Bible for the rule of theii' conduct, 
and sought to make their lives correspond to its teachings. It 
was because the Bible taught them that all men are equally 
the objects of the special care of God, and that all men are 
brotliers in Christ, that the whole conception of the respect 
that is due from man to man was changed, and no Puritan 
was so high in rank that he did not recognize a spiritual equal- 
ity in the humblest Chi-istian. Of a Puritan of that period it 
was said as something new : " He never disdained the meanest, 
nor fiattered the greatest." " He had a loving and sweet 
courtesy for the poorest." iSo descendant of the men who 
settled Plymouth, Boston, or !N^ew Haven, is worthy of his an- 
cestry, of whom this is not ti'ue to-day. 

But perhaps more important still was the new self-respect 
that was taught those who belonged to the humbler classes of 
society. Xehemiah Wallington has given a beautiful sketch 
of his mother, who was the wife of a London Pm-itan me- 
chanic. He says : '" She was very loving and obedient to her 
parents, loving and kind to her husband, very tender-hearted 
to her children, loving all that was holy, much misliking the 
wicked and profane. She was a pattern of sobriety unto many, 
very seldom seen abroad except at church, When others recre- 
ated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take 
her needle-work and say, ' here is my recreation.' God had 
given her a pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was 
very ripe and perfect in all stories of the Bible, likewise in all 
the stories of the martyrs, and could readily tm-n to them. 
She was also perfect and well seen in the English chronicles 
and in the descendants of the Kin^s of England. She lived in 



63 

holy wedlock with lier husband twenty years, wanting l)ut four 
days." 

This was the kind of respect for manhood which grew up in 
I^Tew England, and if any where in this land, or in the wide 
world, there is a human being who has been cheered in his 
lowly condition by knowing that there is one country where it 
has ever been an acknowledged fact that " a man is a man for 
all that," let him thank the Puritans, who learned it from the 
Bible, and made it here a reality. It is owing to them that no 
American '' kowtows " to any one — and that there is no true 
American who wishes to have any one "kowtow" to him. 



The Puritans also gave to the world a new idea of what it is 
to be a gentleman. With the views respecting manhood which 
they received from the Bible, they conceived a new idea as to 
what is the proper way to treat others. Polished manners and 
a gi-acious deportment to one's equals is not enough, according 
to the Puritan ideal. A man may smile and smile and be a 
villain. There should be such delicacy of perception of the 
rights and feelings of others as to lead a person not only to 
avoid giving offense to any, high or low, but this perception 
should be accompanied by such a treatment of all as reveals a 
friendly feeling. This idea of a gentleman did not exist before 
the time of the Puritans. I do not say that there were not 
persons who had such a character. But Shakespeare uses the 
word " gentleman " more than five hundred times, and not once 
to designate anything more than a person of high social 
position. 

A man who is habitually thoughtless of the feelings of his 
inferiors is not a gentleman according to the Puritan idea. 
One of the most eloquent of English essayists of modem times, 
Rev. Charles Kingsley, a dignitary of the Anglican church, 
says that " The Puritan and not the cavalier conception of 



64 

what a British gentleinaii should be is the one accepted hy tlie 
whole British nation at this day." And yet it is unquestion- 
able that in this country, among gentlemen, there is a distinct 
quality perceptible, which has come to us from our Puritan 
ancestors, which is higher and nobler than anything that is 
common in England. I do not doubt that there are thousands 
of persons in England who are gentlemen in the Puritan sense 
of the term. It is also very probable that in that country there 
is a much larger number of men than in this country who possess 
polish of manner and high culture of every kind. But it is 
not intended as any disrespect to English gentlemen when I 
say that there is an element of what in this country we should 
call rudeness in the way in which English gentlemen habitu- 
ally disregard all the prepossessions and tastes of even their 
equals with whom they come in contact, and exhibit a calm 
assumption of superiority, which to an American is simply 
ludicrous. Mr. Richard Grant White, who carried his admira- 
tion of ever^iihing English to such an extent that his name 
alone in this connection almost provokes a smile, felt obliged 
to devote a chapter in his book on England to this marked 
English trait. While Englishmen are respected the world 
over, every one knows that they are also, as a nation, intensely 
disliked the world over, for then* want of tact, and their disre- 
gard of the feelings of others. What I refer to may be illus- 
trated by an anecdote which was told some yeai-s ago of one of 
the most prominent of British statesmen then living. He 
bore an ancestral name which itseK was a guarantee that he 
had always enjoyed every social advantage. Being in the 
country, at the house of a friend, he was in^dted to address a 
political meeting in a neighboring town. He drove over to 
the public hall, where he found at the door a crowd of vil- 
lagers ready to give him welcome. As he descended from the 
carriage a shout went up, in which the voice of a certain 
brawny ploughman was very conspicuous, who was swinging 



65 

his hat with all enthusiasm. The "noble lord" fixed his eye 
sternly upon this man, and addressed him with the not very 
gracious and very peremptory order : " You fellow, stop your 
bawling !" 

A former citizen of Mew Haven, still highly honored here, 
who lived for many years in Germany, visited the city of 
Thorn for the purpose of being present on an important anni- 
versary occasion. He said that he found in the moraing, in 
the crowded breakfast-room of the hotel, such an assemblage 
of German statesmen and German scholars as was rarely to be 
met. It chanced that an English ambassador on his way to 
Constantinople from London to attend a conference of the 
Great Powers had arrived the evening before, and coming 
down to breakfast found some difficulty in getting a seat for 
himself and his party. Standing in the middle of the room, 
with a loud voice, he gave utterance to some very uncalled for 
and contemptuous remarks about the want of politeness and 
the coarse manners of the German people. Dr. Joseph P. 
Thompson, who heard him, said that though the English am- 
bassador spoke in English and to his own friends, he was heard 
and perfectly understood by every one in the room, and what 
he said could hardly have been a more public affront to the 
best men in Germany if it had been said in the Reichstag 
itseK. 

Now in the United States, with all our faults, there has 
come to us directly from the Puritans, a gentleness and a genu- 
ine kindliness of manner, and a respect for even the prejudices 
of others, which is constantly remarked by Englishmen them- 
selves who have been in this country. 

Mr. James Eussell Lowell, in his recent volume of poems, in 
the tribute which he pays to his friend Professor Agassiz, well 
describes the Puritan idea of a gentleman. It may be con- 
sidered to be the recognition by an American descendant of 



the Puritans of the same qualities which marked a descendant 
of the Swiss Puritans. 

He was so human ! Neither strong or weak, 
Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared, 
But sate an equal guest at every board. 
No beggar ever felt him condescend. 
No prince presume ; for still himself he bare 
At manhood's simple level, and where'er 
He met a stranger, there he left a friend. 



One other characteristic has been stamped by the Puritans 
on the whole American people — a peculiar respect for woman. 
I quote from one of the latest of the English historians, who 
says that even in England a new conception of womanhood 
was developed by them. He says expressly, in so many 
words, that " Home as we conceive it now, was the creation of 
the Puritans." " Wife and child rose from mere dependents 
on the will of husband or father, as husband or father saw in 
them saints like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a 
divine spirit, and called with a divine calling like his own. 
The sense of spiritual fellowship gave a new tenderness and 
refinement to the common family affections." This feeling 
also was intensified in this country, and the respect with which 
woman has in consequence ever been treated here is known 
the world over. A deference is manifested to her which 
is accorded to her nowhere else. The American woman of 
all others may well join in grateful acknowledgments to her 
Puritan ancestry. 

L.ofC. 




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